16 February 2015

The green line again

Some more photography along this line, somewhere between Old Street station and Moorfields Eye Hospital, at a point where water from a construction site had made a large puddle in the gutter, which some vehicles drove through, and some pedestrians got soaked as a result of the spray.


A bit of searching for the history of the green line reveals that it was painted by an artist named Warren Neidich. In an interview he said:

"since I began as a photography I tend to think of all mediums in terms of photography. For instance, in London I did this project called Blindsight in which I used the machine they paint streets with to paint a green line from the subway station to Moorfields Eye Hospital, so that partially sighted people could find their way there. It was a kind of Situationist project about nested perceptual realities within the larger framework of the urbanscape. In the end, however, the line became something that I photographed and that generated images. Beyond the photographs of the document of my performance I actually made images that recounted the very nature of what it is to be blind and described the limits of the camera as image machine. Could the camera act like touch and construct a total image from a multiplicity of possible focal points in time, in memory?"

In this video you can see him painting it -


Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as primary visual cortex or V1, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.

No comments: