Visualize and Awaken deals with the question of how to see the world with new eyes. It is a summary of design research conducted over ten years in a seminar at the art college Musashino where Kenya Hara teaches and serves as a continuation of his earlier work Ex-formation. Awareness of the world emerges only after one has already entered an environment that feels self-evident. In other words, to become aware is to situate oneself within a network of cause and effect, where a sense of stability has formed in relation to one’s surroundings; learning that one action leads to another, interpreting signs and anticipating what comes next.As babies are born into this world, they use their sensory organs with full capacity, absorb the rules that govern their environment in and create an image of the world. To create new connections or uncover compelling phenomena in the world, we must observe this “obviousness” and try to step outside of it. The research exhibited here unravels the stable relationship between people and their environment, introducing unfamiliar modes of seeing and perception. It is an experiment that reframes the “ordinary” and the “unusual” while calmly observing the composition of “cognition.”
