bucket list curated by
#37
Nathan Thompson The Flaming Beacon “Keep an eye out for irregularly strobing Ganzfeld phenomena.”
What
Not so much a place as it is a situation. The view – what you see there – is as ethereally beautiful as the view inside Olafur Eliasson’s hazy colour fields, and as surprising and astonishing as hitting the sweet spot under Anish Kapoor’s big bean in Chicago.
Where & When
The first time for me was in the early 1970s, driving along a country road in the Australian bush, in the back of my mum’s Combi Utility, with the low sun shining through the trees casting shadows across the road. I found that if I closed my eyes gently and looked towards the sun, I would see an intense red field – the blood in my strongly backlit eyelid – and that strong red field would abruptly flash to black and then back to bright red with my passage through the shadow of each tree we zoomed past.
How & Why
With some time, this bright red irregularly strobing field starts to build up some artifacts – bursts of other colours that start as complementary but then aren’t. Shapes that start as a noisy bright spot but then aren’t. Fragmentary shapes of colour that appear differently in each eye giving the artifacts greater dimensional definition. And pretty soon I could relax myself into a full-field, all encompassing, hectic, strobing, psychedelic experience that would go for as long as we kept driving past the trees and through their shadows. www.tfb.com.au
Image: Nathan Thompson
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