Come and see with your eyes closed

Can we see with our eyes closed? Of course we can! If you do not believe it, make sure to visit Zagreb’s Lauba – the House for People and Art, where the Seeing with Eyes Closed installation will fully convince you of that. You have until March 13th, because after that this work of art will be sent around the world.

When science and art are combined the result is the Seeing with Eyes Closed installation by Ivana Franke, which will be the main exhibit at Zagreb’s Lauba Gallery until March 13th. Lauba is one of the newer museum spaces in Zagreb which has intrigued aficionados of modern art with its non-permanent exhibits. It has been fondly dubbed a “house” rather than a museum. In mid-February the installation Seeing with Eyes Closed by Ivana Franke from Zagreb was presented with equal excitement. It is part of her exhibition Waking Background, which is also on show until the aforementioned date.

Seeing with Eyes Closed is an installation of LED lights programmed to flicker simultaneously at different frequencies. Visitors are invited to participate by being exposed to the flashing lights with closed eyes, which gives rise to a quasi-hallucinatory visual experience of flowing images. Thus, each participant creates their own image of what they see.

The same effect is achieved with the series of prints Waking Background and the artist’s book Distant Feeling, both of which are spatial translations of the temporal sequence of flashing light used in the installation Seeing with Eyes Closed, but this time into black and white stripped pattern. The duration of each flash of light is translated into the width of a white bar, and the durations of the dark pauses between the flashing lights are translated into black bars at a range of spatial frequencies between 12 and 50 cycles. In other words, after a short viewing the interchanging white and black stripes provide different visual illusions similar to the moiré effect (when we see other images and patterns in a particular web of patterns).

The Seeing with Eyes Closed installation has been realized as part of the interdisciplinary namesake project in cooperation with the German neuroscientist Ida Momennejad and The Association of Neuroesthetics in Berlin. The cooperation did not occur accidentally as the author, Ivana Franke, nowadays lives in Berlin, and her earlier work has already probed the scientific side of art. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, she worked on several study programs at the Institute for Space Research (Institut für Raumexperimente) in Berlin, the Centre for Modern Art in Kitakyushu, and the Center for Modern Art PS1 in New York. She represented Croatia at the 52nd biennale in Venice in 2007 with the independent exhibition Latency and the 9th biennale of architecture in Venice in 2004. She has also realized numerous projects in cooperation with architects and has held an array of other independent exhibitions in Europe.

The Seeing with Eyes Closed installation was first exhibited during a symposium held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2011, and after Lauba it will be moved to the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.