The Groundbraking Clarity of Ryan and Trevor Oakes

Identical twins Ryan and Trevor Oakes have created an innovative method of depicting the world before us that constitutes a key ad-vancement in the representation of visual reality. Their discovery is the synthesis of reciprocal intuitions, observations and experiments generated by their ongoing dialog about perception — about “see-ing with two eyes.” They have been reexamining the knowledge that our experience of the world is binocular and as if we were at the center of a giant perceptual sphere. They came to realize it would be more appropriate to draw on a spherical surface rather than a flat sheet of paper, and found a way of tracing the world directly onto the curved paper without digital intervention, mathematical calculations or drafting tools. The result is the visual and physical experience of a seamless and organic rendering, with no beginning and no end, that does not fail to remind me of Frederick Kiesler’s original concepts in his project of the Endless House, “endless like the human body.” The fascinating part of Ryan and Trevor’s pioneering system is, as art historian Jonathan Crary articulates it, “that they have reintroduced the corporal features of human vision in perspective techniques that had been edited out of our conventional monocular models of repre-sentation where the world is presented as if all parts of it were seen with a uniform clarity when in fact the illusion we have of a clear world is obtained by our eyes darting around producing a synthetic image of an overall clarity."