MIROIR NOIR: SHDW GRDN

These graphics and this card game is a strand of a project that began a few years back called Miroir Noir. The purpose of the project is for exploring and interacting with the nature of one's own visual perception. The Miroir Noir project features highly subjective, 'automata' graphics where-in the conscious mind is subverted both in the creation and perception of the graphics - or so-called artwork. This has the effect of bringing to light some of the less obvious aspects of perception especially the aspect of perception by which we make patterns and occasionally meaningful potential where it is not necessarily so. The graphics are also playful with the process of how perception is continuously reprocessing and refreshing input. This can be described simply in the way the figure-ground relationship in the two-faces/vase illusion remains in subjective flux.

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This is a card game based upon visual automata experiments that have results not unlike inkblot tests. They are like inkblot tests in that they can potentially engage the imagination of the user. There is a phychological phenomena termed pareidolia. Common examples of this would include seeing animals and faces in the embers of a fire or clouds. Leonardo da Vinci descirbes pareidolia in an imaginative exercise,

"if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms."


By the use of imaginative mnemonic devices it is possible retain recognition of these otherwise chaotic and unfamiliar graphics. The game has a strategic element by which the down-turned cards can be re-arraged in sequences to set up consecuitive 'tricks' or turns as in billiards. But in this game, rather than setting up angles and positions - setting up micro-narratives and mnemonic devises seems to be the trick.