My work explores the physical, messy nature of thinking and the prismatic quality of reality. While some works focus on the act of perception and cognition, others use this as a starting point and examine basic human concerns.  

During the Luminous Bodies residency I will examine differences between perceiving the faces of others and one’s own face.  Perceiving faces and recognizing emotions is extremely important to us as a species. We have specialized mechanisms so that we can do this almost instantaneously.  When we see others we absorb a range of information including emotions, and our faces have numerous muscles that help us convey emotional nuances.  For example, smiling requires over 20 muscles. However, interestingly, for all our attention to faces and tributes to the eyes being windows to the soul, eyewitness identifications and our recall of another person’s eye color is not always correct. How can there be so much physiological, cultural and emotional emphasis on people’s faces combined with a less than stellar ability to recall faces afterwards? What are we really looking at? Do we look at our own face in the same way that we look at other people’s, and how does the popularity of plastic surgery relate to the ways that we look at faces? Playing off different modes of perception, the work will combine dynamically processed video that highlights change and still imagery. 

~~~

Initially inspired by how two ballet positions can look identical yet feel radically different, K Staelin’s work is also informed by interaction design, digital scholarship practices and medieval art.  K Staelin has shown in the United States and internationally, and lives in New York City. Currently she is in Hanover, NH, working on digital museum collection projects.