Stine Bidstrup, Optical Constructions, 2006

In my work, I create possibilities of seeing and exploring how vision is intrinsically linked with the human body. In meeting
the work, the body, as the scale with which we measure everything around us, and our navigational and spatial awareness
become activated through visual manipulations and interactive environments. I am interested in this to question the primacy
of vision. By undermining it and breaking up the visual field, mixing the flattened, mirrored image with the surroundings, I
allow the viewer the simultaneously empowering and uncanny position of being both spectator and viewed.
The ephemeral nature of the moving image and materials such as glass can simultaneously hide and reveal, distort
and portray, reflect and refract, magnify or mirror, to illustrate my concerns with the nature of phenomenology of perception,
and place the viewing subject in the middle of this discourse.

With this I want to address our awareness of the world around us, and the moment of discovery, as the moment when we
become aware of what we are looking at is something other than what it first appeared to be. It is an attempt to engage
the moment, where vision and spatial understanding come together. We always have a blind spot, where the optical nerve is
connected to the retina, which makes the eye blind on that very spot. In this same way, every observation assumes a blind
spot that we are not even aware of, because the eye always compensates. We do not see that we do not see, and the
highest degree of vision is also the highest lack of vision. All one can do in this kind of situation, is to try to move these
blind spots, in an effort to catch a glimpse of what has been invisible. This is obviously difficult, when we are used to having
a fixed reference point, to which we can anchor our descriptions in order to confirm their validity.  
I create settings to explore reciprocal inter-actions between the eye of the camera, capturing a momentary situation,
a passing condition of light or an isolated, carefully framed and focused fragment, and the experience of spatial reality
depending fundamentally on peripheral and anticipated vision; the mere experience of interiority implies peripheral
perception. The perceptual realm that we sense beyond the sphere of focused vision is as important as the focused image
that can be frozen by the camera.

If we choose to follow this line of thinking, we are in fact forced to call into question the foundation for our understanding of
aspects of reality as either natural or cultural constructions. When moving through natural or historical settings, our spatial
discoveries are bound up with the discovery of peripheral perception eliciting powerful emotional engagement.
This assumption suggests that one reason why contemporary, public spaces often alienate us has to do with the poverty of
peripheral vision. Focused vision makes us mere outside observers; peripheral perception transforms retinal images into a
spatial and bodily involvement and encourages participation.
The result of these thoughts are also that we are being shaped by historic and cultural constructions, habits and traditions,
which can, on the one hand have a disheartening effect, since it can paralyze the will, and, on the other hand, it can come
as a refreshing opportunity, inasmuch as we – if we make ourselves conscious about this process – have the opportunity to
participate in determining the influence and the result. Within this context it is vitally important to question generally
accepted theories, concepts and existing categories as contents in motion, and to place these inquiries within the
existential utilitarian context of life; the objects and spaces of everyday life. I find that the details and the unseen of our
everyday experience, occupy the realm, where such structures and categories, can be explored in interesting ways.
Because this is where, we rarely notice how culturally determined our perception is, how ‘un-natural’ we are.
My intentions are not necessarily to function as an advocate for changing these structures, but to change our perception of
them, and to produce a critical attitude through a play with notions of the public-private, real-fictive, static-dynamic.

By giving viewers heightened visual experiences, I believe that a subconscious mode of active vision, fused with integrated
spatial and tactile experience has the potential to make us more democratic in thinking about what kind of reality we want
to construct with the tools available to us today. The object of a creative act is not only enfolded by the eye and the touch,
but has to be interjected, and identified with our own bodies and existential experiences.