The project Mercurial Visions is an exploration of how our perceptions of reality can change when the principles of mapping from the illuminated world, through our senses, to visual perception are altered. All photography depends upon pareidolia, the tendency for perception to impose meaningful interpretations on nebulous stimuli. ‘Objective’ photography seeks to make images as unambiguous as possible, although alternate readings are always possible. Digital photography utilising high resolution sensors and conventional workflows leaves space for many interpretations, but aims to make the subject photographed as unambiguous as possible. Strategies for defamiliarization of visual representations, as pioneered in photography by the Bauhaus photographers and surrealists, seeks to open up the space of interpretations, not only of what a subject means, but of what a subject is. Defamiliarization opens images to a wider field of projections of meaning by the perceiver, allowing for more creative events of perception, expressions of the subconscious, readings in terms of a broader field of other images, opening possibilities for magical interpretations, projections of fears, desires, the animistic, and the mythopoeic.
Mercurial Visions explores defamiliarization of digital images by using unconventional mappings from digital sensor values to the representation of images and therefore their perceived subjects and meanings. All of the images are initially formed by ‘straight’ photography. But idiosyncratic mappings to final image values of tone and colour, as well various combinations of reduced resolution, extended shutter times, obfuscating textures and less defined forms liberate images from the constraints of representing a supposed objective reality. Pareidolia is amplified and the resulting images are created as much or more by the imagination of the viewer than by the initial imaging subject.
Methods drawn from a long tradition of experimentation in image creation continue to create languages for exploring new visual worlds, with new possibilities opening as image creation technology rapidly evolves. Mercurial Visions is a project based upon some of these image possibilities in a particular area in the South of Sweden. The selection and sequencing of images, creating a spatio-temporal form, can imply a narrative, which exists only in the mind of the perceiver. The narrative begins with a portal, the passage through which is captured as a distorted four-dimensional transition. The portal leads to a mythopoeic world, where lakes of mercury lie under a silver sky, and the forest contains beings that blend humans, plants, animals and the supernatural, in a style often reminiscent of the half formed and shifting memories of dreams. These images demonstrate how our reality is constructed on conventions, which when broken can lead to new realities and reveal aspects of how we construct them.
