perception

There are 89 posts tagged perception (this is page 2 of 18).

Rain is essential to my sense of identity

In the first page of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison writes: “…rain is as essential to our sense of identity as it is to our soil.” She is writing about the English countryside, which is something that is not really familiar to me, but the fact is that now I realise that the only thing that I consider essential to my sense of identity is rain.

I’m from Spain, yeah, that supposedly sunny place, but Spain is not really such a sunny place, at least not all of it. I’m from the northwest corner of the country, in which it usually rains around 180 days per year, and I fucking love it. Now I live in Barcelona, which is a really sunny place, and I hate this weather.

But I think it’s going to rain today.

Into each life some rain must fall

“…it seems to me that rain is a mirror of one of our key emotional states: not a negative one at all, but deeply necessary – just as necessary as joy. Water, after all, both reflects us, and brings life; it was also, for Jung, an archetype of the unconscious, and of change. ‘Into each life some rain must fall,’ wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (or was it Dennis Potter?) – and it’s quite true: after all, nothing new can grow without it.”

Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison.

Psycho 60/98

WARNING: This film contains flashing images.

“Psycho” (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock and “Psycho” (1998) by Gus Van Sant collide in a frame-by-frame editing that assaults the eyeballs and assassinates the normative consciousness of the viewer. The footage seem to penetrate us, as though it was a knife or a threatening phantasmagorical entity. The fast succession of single frames and extremely short audio files produce afterimages and aftersounds—entoptic and endaural phenomena—creating a film that does not happen on the screen, but in our brain cells.

*Just a technical note for those interested on how things are made, this film consist just of both shower scenes fragmented in frames; the odd frames are the shower scene from the Hitchcock movie and the even frames are the shower scene from the Van Sant remake. No image or sound effects of any kind, just the frames. Sense-destructive cinema, enjoy! :)