Spectral Vision

Looking from the street you can see the small white flowers of the overgrown potato vine whose years of interlocking growth provide the garden with shelter from the constant flow of traffic. Curious as to how much you can see inside the house I zoom, directing the focus on the downstairs window. Then stop. A strange physical sensation passes through my body in advance of any interpretation of what I have registered. The feeling is equivalent to being startled, but somehow different, a strange coldness that passes through the body but contains the prickly heat of irrational fear. I can make out the faint figure of a person in the grainy and pixelated image of the window, but not any of the people I expected. This is my own home yet the figure appears as a pale elderly reflection in the glass. A thousand cheap horror movie tricks have conditioned my response to this type of image. I recover from the initial recoil and study the image closer. The underlying compression algorithm is exposed by the magnification. The integrity of the image is at the point of impressionistic disintegration into geometric abstraction. I’m sure that the occultist Helena Blavatsky would have appreciated the geometric revelation thinly disguised behind the naturalistic representation of the world. I become aware of familiarity within the weak outline of the figure. A sensation I associate more with touch than sight. My conscious mind lags my body in its recognition, too distracted by irrationalism. Both the bodily sensations of knowing and my conscious thoughts start to coalesce into recognition. Feelings form into images only to form a name at the end of the process. This is Jenny, my partner’s 91 year old mother. Someone I know well but who seldom visits our house. A rare visit, a fleeting moment, has been captured and stands as a spectral representative for all the moments of this house.

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John Wild

John Wild is a London based artist who works across performance, sound, text, code, electronics and machine learning to carry out speculative research into the utopian and dystopian futures imminent within digital technology.

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