Sebastian Wickeroth

Raw feels

Sebastian Wickeroth
Raw feels

25 October 2019 — 17 November 2019

Curator: Anna Zaitseva
The exhibition is part of the Moscow-Düsseldorf cultural exchange programme

The works of the series ‘Raw feels’ were created in year 2019 during a two-month stay at the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow. All photographs were taken with a smartphone in passageways of the subway of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The crucial factor for the visual appearance of the works is the brightness adjustment that is not focused on the spatial situation as usual, but it is shifted towards the neon lights. It is an attempt to picture the lights, deblurred and without incurring over-exposure. As a result, the surroundings emerge as strongly under-exposed. Many of the lights are rendered in bizarre colors. The light no longer lights up the surrounding but seemingly plunges it into darkness. Thus, many people in these photos become invisible. This happens due to the functionality of a camera. It reveals a weakness of the camera, and a disparity to the human perception apparatus, which steadily resolves this extreme contrast in brightness by means of computational speed, and capacity of the human brain. This human ability and quality of visual perception raises the issue of its own functionality, mechanisms and its relation to reality. Moreover, it should be noted that reality always was and is a highly controversial and unexplained concept.

The title ‘Raw feels’ refers to this discourse. ‘Raw feels’ or Qualia is defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. By definition, it is impossible to convey Qualia verbally, it is also impossible to demonstrate them directly in an argument. Nobody knows how these subjective sensory impressions arise, but the sensation of them is real. Despite their intrinsic subjective nature, they are maybe the most real things to us.