Series | Making Sense · SIGHT
What Our Eyes Decide Before Our Bodies Do
In the Pacific Northwest there's a word, sunbreak, for those moments when the sun finally pushes through the clouds after days of gray. Every fall, when the sky settles into its fifty-shades-of-gray season (it's no coincidence that book is set in Seattle), I think of a pair of glasses with a soft orange tint that I loved wearing. Everything looked warmer and brighter through them, and for some reason I saw the world with a little more optimism. After five years in Miami, surrounded by intense light and saturated color, the change of scenery hit hard. The yellow-tinted pair was even better: on the grayest of days, it gave me back a clarity I didn't even know I'd been looking for.
There's a reason we talk about seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. It's a pretty vivid way of linking what we see to how we feel. When I wrote about music, I described it as a tinted overlay on a place; with those glasses, the overlay was literally right in front of my eyes. Optics can explain some of the shifts in contrast and brightness. The optimism is all yours. It still fascinates me that such a small change can alter how a familiar place feels, and that the information our eyes take in is only the first step in a process shaped by our expectations, what we've lived through, and the associations we've learned to make.
Sometimes we decide with our eyes what our bodies haven't confirmed yet. You see an armchair covered in long, shaggy fur and you can practically feel how soft it is before you sit down. An ottoman that looks like concrete makes you brace for something hard and cold, even though it might be made of foam. We make these calls all the time: a glossy surface suggests certain qualities, a thick weave signals weight, and a particular finish can convince us that something costs a fortune. Sometimes we're right. Other times we realize we built an entire expectation on a very convincing appearance. We say seeing is believing, or I saw it with my own eyes, as if looking were enough to prove something. Sight is the sense we trust most, and maybe that's exactly why it's also the easiest one to steer.
The Collage of Appearances
Perception pulls together visual information, context, and the cultural associations we've picked up over a lifetime. An object can look luxurious because of its material, but also because of the light around it, the way it's presented, or where we come across it. I've always thought in terms of collage, both when I'm composing and when I'm connecting ideas. The same object can take on a completely different meaning depending on what sits next to it, what stands out, and what stays out of frame. Looking works in a similar way: we gather fragments of information and put together an interpretation that depends as much on the pieces as on how they're arranged.
I think about the difference between walking into Walmart and walking into Target. You might be shopping for similar things, but each store builds a different visual experience. The layout, the lighting, the finishes, and the way products are displayed all shape our expectations about quality, price, and style. Target has built an identity that a lot of people associate with a more curated shopping experience. People even jokingly pronounce it "Tar-zhay," as if we were walking into some super bougie Parisian boutique. It always makes me smile, because it shows how much a cultural association can color something as ordinary as buying toilet paper. The staging is part of what we think we're buying.
Lighting works the same way. A while back, social media declared war on "the big light," that overhead fixture that lights up the whole living room with almost interrogation-level efficiency. The alternative was low lamps, warm light, and small pools of brightness. I get why it caught on. The same room can feel like a different place when the light is spread around differently. Shadows show up where every detail used to be visible, some objects take center stage, and others fade into the background. Changing the light reorganizes the visual hierarchy of a space and, with it, the associations we make as we move through it.
What Stays Out of Frame
Film knows this power well. In The Wizard of Oz, the shift from sepia Kansas to Technicolor Oz is all it takes to tell us we've landed in another world. But what draws me in most is what happens when a film chooses to show us only part of a scene. A half-lit room can make us anticipate something we haven't seen yet. A shadow that shows up before the person casting it, a door left ajar, or a figure behind frosted glass is unsettling precisely because of what it holds back. The director controls the framing, how long an image stays on screen, and the moment something is revealed, and we fill in the rest with our own suspicions. If you've ever watched a horror movie, you know how creative the imagination can get when it's left to work on its own.
In their paper "The Science of Art," researchers V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein proposed that solving small visual puzzles can be part of aesthetic pleasure. Recognizing a partly hidden figure or spotting a pattern involves a kind of perceptual work that can feel rewarding. I like that idea of leaving something to discover. There's a kind of complicity between whoever lays out the clues and whoever tries to decode them, and a certain tension too, because the viewer starts forming hypotheses long before having all the information.
In a physical space, those same tools become design materials: light, contrast, reflection, and scale guide the eye and build a sequence of discoveries. The difference is that here the body gets involved too. Each visitor decides where to pause, which way to go, and what to look at more closely, and as they move, they find out whether their eyes kept their promise. That gap between what sight anticipates and what the body confirms is part of the material I work with. In an installation, an ottoman that looks like concrete and turns out to be soft can be a delightful surprise. In a product that promises quality, a surface that looks solid and feels flimsy is a broken promise.
There's something a little unsettling about all this, which is probably why I'm so drawn to it. If we can influence what someone looks at, we can also shape the expectations they build. Advertising, retail, architecture, and art all use these tools, with very different intentions. A presentation can suggest exclusivity, a space can convey trust, and thoughtful lighting can give something ordinary an unexpected appeal. Appearance plays a part in our decisions, in what we want, and in the value we assign to things. And the more natural an impression feels, the less likely we are to stop and look at what shaped it.
Glasses On, Glasses Off
A few years ago, I offered ChromaDepth glasses to visitors walking through a couple of my installations. They use the way different colors of light bend to create an illusion of depth: reds seem to come forward and blues fall back. What I remember most is how intense the lights looked, as if everything had an extra glow and certain colors were peeling away from the space around them. Some people kept putting the glasses on and taking them off, comparing. I loved that gesture, because the whole transformation depended on such a simple action from the visitor. For a moment, the conditions of seeing were right there in plain sight.
The philosopher Bence Nanay revisits a classic idea in art, making the familiar strange, and explains it through attention. In everyday life we look in order to recognize things and use them: we see a chair and already know it's for sitting. An aesthetic experience can spread that attention across many qualities at once, like color, shape, depth, and whatever surrounds it. Those visitors already knew where they were and what was in front of them; what they were doing was lingering on the color and depth of a composition that, seconds earlier, had seemed fixed.
Those glasses made visible something everyday life rarely lets us notice: how much the same place can change depending on how we're looking at it. Most of the time we see something, recognize a few signals, and build an interpretation that feels like reality itself, without registering the decisions someone made before we ever walked in. Every fall, when the sky turns gray again, I think of my orange glasses. I knew perfectly well it was just as cloudy outside, and still those lenses gave me back a light I missed. That's where the power to steer what we see changes hands: you get to use it on yourself, and seeing the world through rose-colored glasses becomes a choice. //SC