Binocular Rivalry

August 24 - 26 at Project-Q
Amsterdam Avenue and 151st Street,
New York, NY 10031

for more information: http://projections.space

Qubit is pleased to present Binocular Rivalry, an immersive light and moving-image installation by Bernhard Fasenfest. Binocular Rivalry fills the sprawling 6000 square feet of Project-Q’s exhibition space with luminous grids of cascading light, tactile environments, textural fabric projections, and other works that explore the multimodal capacity of expanded cinema. The installation encourages viewers to engage in embodied cognition, moving in and around projected architectures and objects, navigating real and imagined topographies, and exploring unfamiliar perceptual environments. Drawing upon traditions of structural filmmaking as well as cutting-edge concepts of modern psychophysics, the mesmerizing sensory experiences of Binocular Rivalry invites the spectator to take an active role, not only in understanding the processes of mediated perception, but also in creating their own unique aesthetic experiences.

“I ask that a film discover something for me,” declares Luis Buñuel, who is himself a fierey pathfinder of the screen. And what are films likely to discover? . . . They tend to reveal things normally unseen; phenomena overwhelming consciousness; and certain aspects of the outer world which may be called ‘special modes of reality.’”-- Siegfried Kracauer

The phenomenon of binocular rivalry in neuroscience occurs at the boundaries of normal visual perception: when radically different images are presented to each eye, the visual system, struggling to fuse together a three- dimensional view of the world, becomes unstable. Vision oscillates in seemingly random intervals between the images, sometimes fusing them into bizarre hybrids and patterns. In this way rivalry is both a revealing lapse in normal perception, making apparent the usually invisible inner workings of stereo vision, and a form of synthesis, in which the brain creates novel perceptions out of an estranged encounter with real stimuli. The exhibition engages with this idea of analysis through synthesis, bringing spectators into extraordinary experiences that engender new modes of perception.