Our mind’s eye is filled with animated scenarios that summon our emotions, senses and experiences. They acknowledged that whatever they were imagining was essential to conceptualizing their ideas, and yet they could not articulate, much less recall, what they “saw.”Īs creative professionals, we mine the imagery of our physical worlds our brains absorb massive amounts of visual data.
But when I asked what they had been seeing in their mind’s eye, they were stumped. When I asked my “subjects” what they had been working on, they remembered easily: designing a book proposal, puzzling out the script for a play, conceiving characters for a novel.
I saw this again and again, and it made me wonder: What are they looking at? In their videos, they occasionally pause and enter a deep-thought space, gazing away from or beyond their computer screen. Over several months, I asked friends and acquaintances to use Photo Booth to record themselves while they worked on their laptops in their favorite café or library. But I became obsessed with the subject as I developed my exhibit for the RISD Museum. I’m not usually so cognizant of what I see in my mind’s eye. And then my thoughts went farther afield, calling up hazy images for my own creative work. Simultaneously, I saw my own memories: climbing the stairs to the High Line, waiting for a friend in the Guggenheim rotunda. As I watched the video, I realized that the images I was really “seeing” were in my head: 14th and Tenth? I pictured the High Line. At the Museum of the City of New York, a video by the artist Neil Goldberg features short close-ups of individuals identifying the Manhattan street corner where they are standing.
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