ABSTRACT
‘Vision’ is itself polysemic: there are many meanings, some concerned with eyesight, some concerned with mindsight, and some concerned with a kind of propulsion into an imagined future, or past. All modes of vision, all alternatives, represent something we may not have noticed and now see, or something we re-see, or re-notice, or even see beyond the previously imagined. Alternative vision lifts us out of the natural attitude, the everyday, the habitual. It take us to places that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable, or, contrariwise, to the unfamiliar, the pleasurable, the deliciously transformative. The polysemy of vision and art expressed in and through our tissue of senses should fill us with wonder and with dread: wonder for the immensity of beauty and creativity; dread for the potential of our own and the world’s self-destruction.
