Javier Toro Blum

Eigengrau

Entering the room you barely can see. After a few moments the eyes commence to adjust to darkness and slowly a monumental dark rectangle with an aura commences to appear. What you see in the screen is your perceptual system, your body becoming the cinematographer projecting your own blind movie, result of the activity of the ‘off-cells’, product of our retina.

In complete darkness what we see is not merely an absence of light but a complex phenomenon called eigengrau. Eigengrau [from the German instrinsic grey: eigen (one’s own), and grau (grey)], also called brain grey, is a particular kind of vision produced by the action potentials in the optic nerve producing a visual noise product of the retina. These random events are produced by the activity of the retina itself in comparison to the ones produced by the actual stimulation by light. So what we see in darkness is the activity of our own perceptual system, as an external phenomenon produced by our own body.

I have developed a light contrast mechanism to isolate the eigengrau, while other areas in a room are still visible, giving me the possibility to use this particular phenomena as the material for my art practice.

I'm interested in the perception and phenomenology of darkness and its subsequent subjective implications.