Circumstance Dictates Course

pt1. (Stability and Adjustment)

As a creative professional, I try to limit disruptive variables that interfere with creative stability. Creative variables are okay, however.

Sometimes, circumstances dictate I stop what I am doing. But those can lead to a creative blessing (though, at the time, it does not feel as such).

As previously noted, I began playing with multiple-exposure photographs in 2017. That style and process were developing into an understanding of how the brain might see an image from all the acquired information from a darting eye: focusing on different parts of an environment and taking mental note as to what is where, the time of day, the moving pieces in ‘space-time.’ (A bit strange and Einsteinian, right?).

Our eyes are not a camera and do not see from a single point, a shutdown aperture, or make a still capture in 1/500th of a second. Our eyes feed visual and physical data to our brain, and the brain composes our understanding of the environment we find ourselves in.

Our eyes constantly scan and refocus, and our brain is “membering.” Add to this our other senses, and all that information is stored for quick short-term analysis (short-term memory) or later recall of that instance (long-term memory). Our brain takes that data and constructs a recognizable description to recognize what is safe or hostile so that we can navigate and interact within our environment and with those in it.

Think of those who lose their short-term memory and can not recall what they just heard or saw. Everything is new, as if being discovered for the first time over and over. Our brains hold together all the data our senses collected, especially and to the most considerable degree, our visual data.

And further, add to that our interpretation of all the data we collect in proximity. We are always proximate to our internal beliefs. That is, we see with bias. Cognitive biases from our prior experiences, from previous data (be it family upbringing, religious, political, trauma, education, news sources, emotional coloration, etc.).

My creative work and discovery continued on the path of exploring my backyard, which happens to be the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip: from the Wynn to the Aria on both sides of the street. I was content with this and went out once a week to gather new data from new circumstances of the ever-changing landscape that is the Las Vegas Strip.

But then continuing events would change the direction my art was taking.

(continued in part 2).