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pleasure in the sounds of the garden all the more. It is not clear whether John Cage was familiar with this traditional technique.
In engaging questions of perception, the use of scientific research suggests itself. At the intersection between scientific and artistic work, instruments that stretch from simple analog machines to technically quite complex apparatuses are systematically tested and developed. In particular, technologically produced perspectives are studied, but also perception spaces that extend into yet unseen areas.
Florian Kleinefenn and Fritz Rahmann illustrate the use of perception technologies and their influence on our experience of the world in a manner that is just as simple as it is impressive. For their «Watteau-Projekt,» made for documenta 8 (1987), they transformed an automobile into a mobile camera obscura,[49] and thus explore their surroundings. Orientation, the foundation of action, is only provided with the assistance of mediated perception, that is, the upside down representation of their surroundings inside thecar. Technical innovations and optical apparatuses like the camera obscura have always challenged artists to engage with such instruments of perception. Usually, however, at the center of interest is not the aspect of the medially mediated perception, as is true here, but the occupation with optical phenomena.
Since the 1960s Alfons Schilling has been studying the physical and optical characteristics of vision, and developed as a result so-called «vision apparatuses» to test stereoscopic sight. What emerged thereby were the most various optical systems that concern themselves with spatial sight in connection to movement, like the «Dunkelkammerhut,» a large portable camera obscura that includes the entire body in the process of perceiving the surroundings. In 1973, under the title «Video-Head-Set» Schilling develops a head mounted display, as had also been presented by Ivan Sutherland at the end of the 1960s; an apparatus in which the user wears two small monitors placed in front of the eyes and thus could have the impression of moving in various spatial and temporal dimensions. However, the technology available at the time had not yet reached a sufficiently advanced state, so that