Already from my first experiments, I was attracted to create deceptive appearances or moments. I was already looking for a moment to surprise the spectator and break his expectations and assumptions. From these first attempts, though, I came in front of the “after-moment” challenge, and I encountered a big dilemma. I had to decide if I would take or reject the magician’s job. At this point, it would be interesting to look closer at how magicians and magic tricks work to justify my decision.
Behind magic tricks, there are always specific mechanisms and apparatuses that only the magician knows and should always be kept as a secret from the audience. The audience’s interest is based on the fact that it can not guess how something is done. Of course, this is not something easy to do. It requires excellent technique and precision, and it is based on the manipulation of time and attention. Particularly time is a core element. The magician must do the trick fast and especially in the vulnerable moments when observation and reflection could reveal the technique behind it. In magic, there is no space for reflection. The audience must be amused and surprised, and this surprising moment should be the end; something new should follow and attract the attention. In this way, the spectator doesn’t have the time to think of the “how” and look for it. Magic requires a passive audience, a stultified spectator, an enthusiastic viewer who is never welcome to ask questions, or better; he already knows that he is not allowed to. The good spectator of a magic show should wonder, “how is this possible?” and then stop thinking. Anyway, magic is made so that even the worst spectator won’t have the time to think for long.
As a scenographer, I want my spectators to reflect on the experiences that I create for them. I don’t want these experiences only to surprise or amuse them but to trigger them to use their fantasy and associate them with their own stories and thoughts and draw their own conclusions. But most of all, I want to show them the multiplicity of reality and make them see the world from different perspectives.
Thus, I could never do the magician’s job. But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t use his tools. This is a difficult task. As magic is based on the fact that the apparatus is never revealed, how can I have both the enthusiasm for the deception and the reflection? How can I keep the interest after the reveal of the secret?
I recently watched a live stream performance of Yoann Bourgeois. The performance was called “I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go.”2 Yoann Bourgeois is a film director and choreographer with a background in the circus that inspired him to research the interaction between the human body and the physical forces through the design of set structures which he calls “devices.” (Brown 2021) With the help of his “devices,” he is creating impossible acts that overcome gravity and the limits of human movement.
In the performance I mentioned above, the set was a table and two chairs attached to a platform that could stand vertically or hang upside down. A team of dancers was interacting with the set in all its possible positions by sitting on the chairs and leaning on the table like everything was normal. Sometimes the camera was filming upside-down, resulting in the set and the dancers looking like they were on the ground. Sometimes, it was filming the overview and revealing how everything actually was. The upside-down view of the camera was also projected on the set, and it was visible from the overview. It is interesting to mention that the clothes and hair of the dancers were giving away the actual position of the set even when the camera was filming upside down.
Even though I knew how everything was made, I never lost my interest throughout the entire performance as a spectator. On the contrary, I was pleased by the aesthetics created by the deceptive appearances and yet not that captivated to stay only on the amusement of the trick and prevent myself from reflecting and following the dramaturgy behind the visuals. Yoann Bourgeois has managed to use deception in the opposite way of the magician but then what his recipe for maintaining the interest was?
After analyzing the two cases, I concluded that the difference between them lies in the kind of attention that the maker wants to attract. In the magician’s case, all the interest is around the “how.” You watch something that looks unreal and impossible, and the fact that you can’t predict how it is made makes it special and fascinating. On the other hand, in Yoann Bourgeois’s case, you already know the “how”; in addition, the “how” is sometimes given to you next to the deceptive result. In this second case, you stay interested: first because of the possibilities of the apparatus and the results that it can produce, which you can’t predict or expect or imagine and second, because nevertheless, you know the “how,” the result appears still deceptive and unreal. Finally, the deception is not the main attraction but a medium that facilitates a narrative.
I was first confronted with these dilemmas during my project named “Alone.” This work started as a collection of deceptive appearances, which were captured with my camera and created with the interactions of a mirror, the landscape, and my body’s movement. The collection process was carried out as follows: I was wandering with the mirror in the mountain Ymittos near my house, looking for places where the reflection of the landscape in the mirror would create visual confusion. Soon, I discovered several powers of the mirror; the one I used the most was the disappearance one: the reflection of similar texture with the mirror’s background resulted in its disappearance. Using this property, I could play with the reflection of several subjects, for example, parts of my body, which would appear as fragments in the landscape and merge with the background elements.
The collected material, aka various short clips I filmed, was interesting to watch and surprising for the spectator who wouldn’t notice the mirror until the body’s appearance, revealing the apparatus. However, after this revealing moment, the interest would decline. The question, whether I should reveal the existence of the mirror or not arose again and again. Everyone who watched these clips focused mainly on the tricks invented, while my intention from the beginning was different. I wanted the deception appearances to be experienced as upsetting moments that would disrupt the considered reality and start a reflection process on perception. I realized, though, that the spectators couldn’t escape from the context of the trick as there was clearly nothing else for them to interpret. As there was no narrative and the visual wasn’t linked to any meaning, there was no reason for them to make associations and see these sequences further than visually. When I later used the same videos and composed them into a film with a certain narrative, the focus of the spectators automatically shifted. Even when the body’s movement revealed the apparatus and how everything worked, the interest was still strong. Then every detail became important and meaningful, and it was a source of information feeding the narrative.
But then, why is deception an important element of my work? In my case, deception doesn’t work only as a spectacle but also as a mechanism that triggers reflection on the various perspectives that one can have. In my view, deceptive moments are powerful because they remind us how fragile the reality that we believe in is. Even if we are aware that what we identify as reality is only what we perceive of the world around us with our senses, prior knowledge, and experiences, we tend to forget that our perception is not perfect. We are so absorbed in what we experience that we rarely take a step back, question it and reset our position to perceive it differently; we rarely reflect on our perception. Deceptive moments act as glitches in our perception. They make something we considered stable and normal look strange, unfamiliar and unknown. These glitches force us to look closer, question what we saw, and sometimes even question our vision. Hence, as our whole reality is based on our perceptual system, a deceptive moment can make us reconsider this reality. We may not question our perception often, but it is a fact that our perceptual systems are not perfect at all.
As Richard Gregory explains in his “perception of hypotheses” theory:
[Our brains] allow past experience and anticipation of the future to play a large part in augmenting sensory information, so that we do not perceive the world merely from the sensory information available at any given time, but rather we use this information available to test hypotheses of what lies before us. Perception becomes a matter of suggesting and testing hypotheses.
(Gregory, 1978:221)
In other words, our perception is not just a transmission of what we see or feel but a combination of more complex functions in our brain which do not necessarily correspond to the physical world.
As Gregory characteristically says:
“The fact that perception can depart from physically accepted realities of objects has philosophical implications and practical consequences. It tells us that our perceptions are not always, and very likely never, directly related to physical reality.”
(Gregory, 1997:197)
Illusions, which Gregory uses many times as examples to illustrate his ideas, are the best mediums to reveal how our brains work and the gap between our perception constructed by assumptions and the physical reality. For example, ambiguous images, like the Necker cube, indicate how we can see the same image in two different ways even though the information received from our eyes is always the same. The Necker cube illusion depicts a line drawing of a cube with a hole. As the line drawing doesn’t give information about which side of the cube is front and which side is back, our perception keeps alternating between the two possible views. What actually happens is that “various orientations and various likely kinds of objects are selected as hypotheses of reality. Each hypothesis - each perception - is entertained alone, but none is allowed to stay when none is better than its rivals.” Eventually, that causes an endless switching in our perception, which doesn’t let us decide which reality to trust. Perhaps, this simple drawing won’t trigger further reflection on perception and reality, but what about a spatial experience based on the principles of illusion and linked to meaningful content? Optical illusions are probably too limiting to experiment with, but there are various other illusions, less popular, related to our other senses, and intriguing to research.
Don’t get me wrong here. By deceptive appearances, I don’t mean by definition illusions. Actually, in my practice, deceptive appearances can’t be exactly defined as they are not something established or explicit. Nevertheless, they can be identified by their effect on the one experiencing them. Thus, I could roughly describe them as ruptures of reality. Pedro Sanchez Carbajo, a former student of the master scenography of HKU, called these moments “encounters with the unknown”, moments that “break the schemes of our rational understanding of the world.”
“...they disturb our preconceived harmonious relation with the known world. They disturb the feeling of security and safeness that comes from the quotidian. They challenge our expectations of reality.”
(Carbajo 2019: 7)
Furthermore, in my practice, these moments are not always deceptive in the same way and degree, nor aim to affect the spectators in the same way. Sometimes they appear illusive and cause surprise and confusion, and other times they don’t aim to surprise at all. Still, they immerse the spectator into a multi-layered experience of reality. As I mentioned, deception started to exist in my work already from my first experiments. Knowing that what I was creating weren’t illusions, I was searching for a suitable name. First, I called these effects “deceptive appearances,” which gradually transformed into “deceptive moments” and “deceptive situations.”Practically this was related to the spectator’s position towards the work. If we think of the words: “appearances” are more related to the vision and thus to a distanced spectator; “moments” are already equivalent to an overall experience that involves both the mind and the body, while “situations” consist of moments and refer to longer periods of time. Similarly, these words also indicate the role and the freedom of the spectator regarding his interaction with the work. In the case of deceptive appearances, there is no space for interaction. This doesn’t mean that the spectator is not active as the purpose is always to initiate a reflection process but that he is not given opportunities to act and experience the work in a more embodied way. On the other hand, the words “moments” and “situations” are less restrictive and do not predispose any relation to the spectator, enabling more possibilities and approaches. So, I ended up using the word “deceptive situations” as the most permissive.
After analyzing the patterns and the tools that I intuitively repeat in my making process, I concluded that the “deceptive situations” I create are based on replication and comparison. When the apparent resemblance of two entities collapses, and the spectator starts comparing them. Thus, I formulated a recipe that could produce deceptive situations by using these characteristics. An artistic system that works as a method based on which I can create new work. Maybe a system sounds too technical and definite for an artistic process, although it is the opposite. It allows freedom and infinite combinations while providing a framework.
According to my system, deceptive situations consist of the following three components:
- An existing environment where deceptive situations happen
- A replica of it
and
- The spectator
These three components can vary a lot and be completely different in each case of a deceptive situation.
The existing environment is a combination of things that constitute what the spectator experiences before the appearance and the interaction with the replica. It is what already exists; I could also name it as the existing reality. It is the space, the time, the light, the air, the temperature, the smell, and everything else that is there to be grasped and felt. It is what is about to be replicated, the original.
A replica is a representation of it. It can be virtual or very physical; it can be a twin, a fragment, a layer, a detail, a scaled model, a reflection, a projection, or a recording; the list is endless.
Last but not least is the spectator: his position, his body, his mind, and his senses.
Creating a deceptive situation starts with the existing environment and ends with the spectator’s experience. Without the spectator, the work is incomplete, as well as none of the components exists without the others; they are related and interconnected. The deceptive effects appear in their in-between relations and interactions when a rupture in the spectator’s expectations upsets his perception. This rupture occurs when comparing the existing environment and the replica leads to different conclusions each time. Furthermore, through replicating the existing environment and exposing the spectator to both the replica and the ‘original,’ a new multi-layered hybrid is created. In this hybrid environment, the spectator experiences the blurred boundaries between the reproduced and the existing environment that sometimes intersect and merge and sometimes contradict each other. This ‘rupture’ also happens when an entity exists in both environments or its actions in one environment affect the other. It is also crucial, the moment, the duration, and what follows the rupture. Moreover, the accuracy of some elements of the replica in combination with the inconsistency of some others.
Every experiment that I did until now is correlated to the explained artistic system. By experimenting, I am discovering new parameters to add to the system, and by reflecting on the system, I come up with new constellations of components that could create deceptive situations. Of course, this artistic system is only one way to create deceptive situations. As the research grows, maybe new strategies and new systems emerge.