Visualizing the Transcalar Imaginary

Every organism experiences its own view of the world. We humans interpret our worlds through ever-shifting lenses of enculturation, embodiment, and enaction, which continually shape our conceptual maps and perceptual experiences. Recognizing our unique perspectives, as well as how they might be expanded, requires identifying the influences and assumptions within which they are enmeshed. While language can provide conceptual descriptors of these processes, sensuous experience can reveal the more immediate role played by perception in the shaping of our intuitions.

Visualizing the Transcalar Imaginary explores how visual immersion can be used to illuminate the often-paradoxical processes of cognition that dynamically structure our expectations and experiences. Employing a contemporary atlas of the observable universe, it presents simulations of phenomena measured beyond the range of unaided human senses to rhetorically illustrate the limitations of perception and representation. Participants are invited to imagine stepping outside of their own perspectives to reflexively consider how suspending beliefs can enable new ways of seeing and knowing the world.