It was a broken TV. Static floods my vision, even when my eyes are closed. It’s pink and blue and green and purple. Like I had rubbed my eyes too hard. Or I had stood up too quickly. I see rapid moving dots, but occasionally, green or black lightning with purple glow stretches across my view. These colors flash and brighten with my pulse if it’s beating too hard. Silhouettes of people and objects linger, even when I’ve looked away. 

For as long as I can remember, this has been my visual experience. 

In Martin Jay’s “The Noblest of Senses”, throughout history, the sense of sight or vision rose to the top of a hierarchy of senses, particularly in Western cultures as far back as classical Greece, which has resulted in many terms in our modern vocabulary like “theory” or “speculation” or common phrases like “melting eyes” and “piercing or penetrating gaze” to be based in sight (Jay, 10). Jay cites Christine Buci-Glucksmann, who discusses a Baroque “madness of vision” which “dazzles and distorts rather than presents a clear and tranquil perspective on the truth of the external world” as a result of “overloading the visual apparatus” (47-48). This particular sentence stood out to me since I saw many parallels with my visual experience.

Visual snow is considered to be an uncommon visual disorder in which a “numerous tiny snow-like dots” persist throughout the visual field and is theorized to be caused by “neuronal cortical hyperexcitability” — an overload of the visual apparatus that causes dazzling and distortion (Ghannam & Pelak, 2017). I have found difficulty expressing my experience to other people. In three videos, I will convey this visual perception anomaly — the dazzling, distorting madness that is my truth — in sixteen different ways with visual analogs and auditory and tactile metaphors.

TEXTURE SERIES 1 (contains rapidly moving images)

TEXTURE SERIES 2 (first twenty seconds contains rapidly moving images)

TEXTURE SERIES 3 (issues embedding, so please open in new window via top right corner)

(Side note: the piece playing in TEXTURE SERIES 1 and TEXTURE SERIES 3 is the first movement of Vivaldi’s “Winter,” as performed by Itzhak Perlman and the London Symphony Orchestra, also from the Baroque era)

References:

Bou Ghannam, Alaa, and Victoria S Pelak. “Visual Snow: a Potential Cortical Hyperexcitability Syndrome.” Current treatment options in neurology vol. 19,3 (2017): 9. doi:10.1007/s11940-017-0448-3

Connor, Steven. “The Menagerie of the Senses.” Synapsis. I cinque sensi (per tacer del sesto), 1 Sept. 2005, Bertinoro, Italy.

Jay, Martin. “The Noblest of Senses.” Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1993, pp. 10–48.