Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge is one of two artists commissioned by BlackFlash to produce a project for the 2.0 website. Her project is an interactive animation that playfully uses the idea of frames, specifically window and door frames, that draw attention between virtual and real parallels. Below are stills from the project. Click here or on a still to see the work yourself.
Note: You will require the free Adobe Flash player to view Evelyne’s work. The file is 5MB in size, please be patient while page loads.
A Challenge to Perception
Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s recent work reveals her interest in trompe l’œil as a method for the destabilization of vision. Her art undermines our perceptual presuppositions by making us conscious of our vision as an activity. Her strategies aim at the problematization of the viewer’s perception.
Perception results from the body’s capacity to track sensory changes in its interactions within the environment. It depends on the movement of the body in space. Perceptual consciousness consists of a complex set of skills of environmental attunement earned in a lifetime and embedded in the enactments of the body. Sight is built on a massive amount of background experience. Alva Noë, philosopher of cognitive science who is a proponent of this view, argues that the apparent immediacy of recognition through likeness in pictorial imagery relies on technologies of depiction developed in accordance with our skills. In other words, we construct pictures in adequacy with a perceptual repertoire inflected by culture. Pictorial recognition follows effortlessly.
