Image by Pekka Mäkinen shows Rachel Henson at Puijo Hill, Kuopio, Finland while presenting a flick book navigated journey for for ANTI Festival.
I’m Rachel Henson. Outshift is my creative practice.
I come up with looking devices for outdoor experiences that startle us into seeing what’s there; a kind of radical noticing. I work with recovering or contested land and its wild and human inhabitants, responding to locations and audiences.
My latest work is a binocular vision hack which plays with how our visual systems decide what to attend to, a discombobulation where we aren’t sure what’s there and what’s not. This startles us into noticing what is happening here and now, and explores the notion that the version we see of the world may be one among many.*
My lens-based practice began when I noticed changes in attention state while solo walking, and how we read the world by moving in relation to it. I made journeys navigated by paper flick books shot from the POV of a walker, the hands-on flick through the pages to see the way ahead is like the landscape reeling past as you walk it. Running with the idea of looking as dynamic and relational, I co-designed the Spooler app, which allows viewers an intuitive physical interaction with digital moving-image, with UI software engineer, Neil Manuell (Escape Velocity, Creative Assembly).
Commissions include for: Discovering Places, National Trust, Natural England, Brighton Festival, ANTI Festival, Finland, Cairo Downtown Festival (R&D), Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, Chester Up the Wall Festival, Undercurrent Weekend, White Night Brighton. Residencies at: Fusebox Immersive Lab, The Living Coast, ONCA Gallery, Fabrica, Blast Theory and, Lighthouse.
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I’m Rachel Henson. Outshift is my creative practice.
I come up with looking devices for outdoor experiences that startle us into seeing what’s there; a kind of radical noticing. I work with recovering or contested land and its wild and human inhabitants, responding to locations and audiences.
My latest work is a binocular vision hack which plays with how our visual systems decide what to attend to, a discombobulation where we aren’t sure what’s there and what’s not. This startles us into noticing what is happening here and now, and explores the notion that the version we see of the world may be one among many.*
My lens-based practice began when I noticed changes in attention state while solo walking, and how we read the world by moving in relation to it. I made journeys navigated by paper flick books shot from the POV of a walker, the hands-on flick through the pages to see the way ahead is like the landscape reeling past as you walk it. Running with the idea of looking as dynamic and relational, I co-designed the Spooler app, which allows viewers an intuitive physical interaction with digital moving-image, with UI software engineer, Neil Manuell (Escape Velocity, Creative Assembly).
Commissions include for: Discovering Places, National Trust, Natural England, Brighton Festival, ANTI Festival, Finland, Cairo Downtown Festival (R&D), Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, Chester Up the Wall Festival, Undercurrent Weekend, White Night Brighton. Residencies at: Fusebox Immersive Lab, The Living Coast, ONCA Gallery, Fabrica, Blast Theory and, Lighthouse.
* Researcher Lani Shiota found evidence that seeing something out of the ordinary recalibrates our predictive vision so that we see the world with fresh eyes and begin to notice more.(Lani Shiota: “How Awe Transforms the Body and Mind”.) Walker Nan Shepherd writes of how illusions of depth and distance, light and weather “drive home the truth that our habitual vision of things is…. only one of an infinite number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us but steadies us again.” (”The Living Mountain” by NanShepherd, 2011 p101)
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