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SENSORAMA

Gaze, reality, deceptions

from Magritte to augmented reality

MAN Museum, Nuoro

8 July 2022 – 30 October 2022

curated by Chiara Gatti and Tiziana Cipelletti

Exhibition project by Denis Santachiara

Coordination by Rita Moro and Elisabetta Masala

Video installations by Storyville

 “Museums of Illusions” have been opening across Europe for some time now. This lofty definition describes a new kind of entertainment represented by a sequence of environments constructed with the aim of producing visual deception, disorientation and leading visitors to question their senses. Scenographic reinterpretations of the most traditional optical illusions: from Schröder’s stairs to Adelson’s checker shadow. Interactive museums for “unusual experiences, dedicated to visitors of all ages”, as the promotion reads.

SENSORAMA adopts the “Museum of Illusions” model in a cultured and original fashion, entrusting the exploration of the relationship between Vision and Perception to the works of contemporary artists and videomakers, with the aim of showing the complexity of cognitive phenomena and the “pleasure” that lies in being deceived. Illusion is our reality. Indeed, we see that little of the world out there that our eyes can see, adding to that what our brain wants us to believe. The result is a representation of things that is in no way real.

The Museo MAN in Nuoro, which has always devoted itself to research and to the various languages of contemporary life, is inaugurating a new exhibition season that aims to reflect on a number of themes prompted by the tragedy of the pandemic and reclusion: interrupted communication, the gaze veiled by the diaphragm of a screen, the reading of images removed from sight and restored to us through a virtual reality. The aim of this exhibition is to go back to looking, to training the eyes and to asking questions about the truth (or otherwise) of vision. Starting from historical precedents, with the great fathers of a style of painting forged from truth and deception, such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, the exhibition opens up the spectrum to the most recent aesthetic investigations into perception, appearance and authenticity.

The answer to the question “do we see reality accurately?” is a resounding “no”. We don’t see it accurately because we filter it through eyes capable of a limited reading of things: we possess nothing like the phenomenal capacity of reindeer to see ultraviolet light, which thereby enables them to recognize ice surfaces covered in lichen, the staple food of their diet. Evolution has selected sight organs that serve to ensure the survival of the species; it has selected what works best for recognizing food and escaping predators. In reality, our eyes are not the only tool we use to create our vision of the world. Indeed, we also use our brains ninety per cent of the time: we are not only observers, but also creators of meaning.

Those who study perception start from these premises, but cannot fail to consider that they have centuries of philosophical discussion behind them, from Plato onwards. The question of whether we really see reality is an ancient dilemma. Today, however, neuroscience can make a start on answering it by studying our sense organs and examining the brain’s capacity to interpret the signals they send it.

We all rely on sight as a criterion of truth and confirmation of the reality of the physical world, yet the perception it gives us is the result of a reworking necessitated by the very structure of the nervous system: without these little tricks concocted by our brain, we would have no way of developing a uniform view of the external world.

SENSORAMA aims to represent the zero degree of perception, which is useful for the purpose of cleaning up our gaze, for going back to wondering at the paradoxes of vision, once again observing works with an enquiring gaze and approaching images with an awareness of a fluid limit between real and virtual, but ready to sharpen our eyes to reveal the mechanisms that orchestrate the very process of vision. An invitation to learn to look, but above all to doubt.

Artists

René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Florence Henri, Alberto Biasi, Luigi Mazzarelli, Peter Kogler,

Felice Varini, Marina Apollonio, Denis Santachiara, Marc Didou, Peter Miller, Liu Bolin,

Marco Cordero, Humans since 1982, Ole Martin Lund Bø, Paolo Cavinato, Cinzia Fiorese,

Marco Di Giovanni, Kensuke Koike.

experimental film section

SENSORAMA is also about cinema, the quintessential artificial art, a “factory of illusions” since its inception and a field of visual experimentation for the avant-garde.

It starts with the fantastic cinematography of George Méliès based on the disappearance of objects achieved by means of a primitive stop frame and the levitation of things and people with one-shot filming, continuing all the way through to phantasmagorical interactions between avant-garde art (Léger, Man Ray, Picabia, Cocteau, Duchamp, etc.) and cinema. Namely experimental cinema, which shatters our “usual” experience of reality by making magic its own and playing with deception and perceptual distortions.

Electa catalog with texts by Baingio Pinna, Chiara Gatti and Tiziana Cipelletti

MAN_Museo d'Arte Provincia di Nuoro