What's it Like to see like a Bat?
I n 1974, Thomas Nagel posed the question, what’s it like to see like a bat? His thought experiment has since become an infamous exercise in our ways of perceiving the world around us. And it’s an idea that echoes through the ‘sketchbook’ of thoughts that follow here — part of a manifesto for slower, more playful seeing. The works below are gathered from a path followed daily, thousands of times by foot or bicycle. The hope (or exercise) is to stir a more lively way of attending to our environments. In the past, the French would have called this the acts of Flâneurie. At the turn of the 20th century, it could be an essential practice for artists and people of all kinds.
The works below form an ongoing sketchbook of observations. They sample things as familiar as snowfall, frozen rivers, city infrastructure, trees captured beneath the ice, or waves beating on debris from once-lived lives. These ideas are meant to open more thoughtful ways of ‘seeing’ the strange and opposing wonders on our lived paths. Each plays with the principles of film, digital, and analog tools we use to capture our worlds — or simply, to ‘see’ the details of our lives through an otherworldly eye.
Nagel's question has always been intriguing to me, partly because it challenges the absolute beliefs we have in our everyday perceptions. Many of us believe ourselves to be the de facto standards of reality. Yet our eyes see less than 1% of the 'light' surrounding us. Birds, fish, and insects can see wavelengths humans can’t. Bats can echolocate. Meantime, hidden electromagnetic and microwaves extend the spectrum of unseen 'light' around us even further. What seems even more remarkable are the ways that certain insects like Monarch butterflies — who like many birds — can follow or 'see' the patterns of the earth in ways we can’t. So with our limited human vision, the rest is left to our imaginations to try and explore. The works here are in part a wonder about this type of thinking. But on another level, they also pay homage to the art of image-making itself — or the ideas, processes, and steps we often take for granted. Playing with the philosophy ‘of Other,’ the sketchbook here imagines a sense of all that remains unseen in the common pathways we follow. At its core is a way of seeing that doesn't ask us to solve immediate views, but to consider the remarkable unseen wonder and beauty unfolding all around us.
— michael graf
Frozen Stream.