Afterimage---Mind Frame

Jaewook Shin, Afterimage---Mind Frame, projection onto blank picture frames + mind, approx. 30 x 40 in, 2007. (© Jaewook Shin)

Afterimage---Mind Frame is a visual installation in which the "medium" of the artwork is the mind. That is, the work uses the physical phenomenon of afterimage in such a way that the viewer sees a familiar image in an empty picture frame.

Viewers focus their eyes on the abstract moving white blocks projected inside a picture frame, which play for a few seconds, go blank, then play again and so on continuously. When the array of blocks stops moving, an afterimage of a famous painting appears in the otherwise blank frame. The array of tiny moving blocks forms a vague representation of the original famous painting and, despite the lack of clarity, the viewer is eventually able to perceive a well-defined impression of the subject. This happens because an afterimage forms as a result of a combination of physical and psychological processes, the former being the human vision system and the latter the automatic retrieval of the famous image from memory. The image formed by focusing on the moving white blocks projected in the frame is combined neurologically with the memory of the original artwork from the brain. Therefore not only do viewers see the afterimage, but the afterimage merges with the original image from their own memory, which fills in the details more fully. Afterimage---Mind Frame gives viewers an uncanny glimpse of how perception and memory work together to form the world as they see it.

Jaewook Shin
Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of Art, New York University, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Web: jwook.com/afterimage.

Updated 27 January 2010