DELUSION

2012

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Installation: film, light, shadow

Length: 6 meters

In the psychiatric field, the word ‘delusion’ designates a false psychotic belief. In Buddhist thought, it designates ignorance and its etymological roots lie in ‘deceit’, ‘a false opinion, erroneous belief formed by the mind and which fools it by its seductive nature’ (Dictionnaire Le Robert).

Extending Just an Illusion (a photograph of an exposed but undeveloped film strip forming the word ILLUSION), the Delusion installation alludes to the allegory of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, according to which our comprehension of the world is only partial insofar as it is limited by the perceptions revealed to us by our senses.

The physiological functioning of the eye is similar to that of a camera obscura: we only perceive the light rays that enter our eye. What we see is actually an interpretation of our brain based on our knowledge of the world and what we believe to be reality. As an example, the film projection uses the Phi phenomenon and the phenomenon of persistence of vision to create the illusion of perceiving continuous motion from a succession of discrete images viewed rapidly in succession. The installation tries to highlight this discrepancy by producing an image - the letters DELUSION projected on the ground - with an unconventional projection system: light passes through a film, but in a different way, mismatching the experience we have about the formation and the temporality of projected images.