Ray tracing-based tools, today, cannot simulate not only characteristics of shadows but also the light perceptions of most people. This project, specifically, was interested in understanding why ray tracing-based methods cannot render the shadow body – a perceived "volume of shadow that exists in an unilluminated space between the illuminated object and its casted shadow" ("What does colour look like?", Tessira Crawford 2022).
Bodies of Shadow
"...I actually couldn’t…tell the difference between the...dark walls or the darkness that the walls created."
Blind to Billionaire
What Does it Mean to Have Light Perception? (2019)
"Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all seems not just mythically about the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters."
Donna Haraway
Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism (1988)
The purpose of this survey was to determine the percentage of two participants resulting in the same perceptual outcomes. The experiment showed that, out of forty-five combinations, 4% had the same perceptual outcomes (all true) and 16% had different perceptual outcomes (all false). The result: within this sample, a pair of participants resulting in different perceptual outcomes was four-times more than the same.
Various Simulations
“For rendering light, ray tracing is a method referred to when simulating light today by tracing the path of light rays within a three-dimensional computer model...Computer application of this method comes with the intent of applying a real-world, or physics-based, understanding of light’s behavior in the environment and effect on photoreceptor cells, implying that light is not only traceable but also indistinguishable. However, ‘[t]he subjective visual space perceived by humans does not reflect a simple transformation of objective physical space; rather, perceived space has an idiosyncratic relationship with the real world’" ("What does colour look like?", Tessira Crawford 2022).
Physical Studies
