Soft Math (Cloud in the Eyes)

Overview

Artist Jonah Freeman explores the ways in which our increasingly technological world has transformed our understanding of nature, the built environment and even of ourselves. "In the solitude of 1660s Cambridge Isaac Newton, driven by an obsession with the nature of vision, took a bodkin, a dull needle-like instrument, and inserted it between his eye and the bone of his skull, pressing against the back of his eyeball to produce shapes, colors, and shadows without any light at all. He wasn’t courting madness but clarity. He wanted to know whether color was a property of the external world or a construct of the nervous system. The resulting hallucinations: concentric rings, strange hues, flickering patterns suggested to him that perception could be self-generated, that the eye did not simply record the world, but help to invent it."