Foreplay with our irises and retinas.

Living in San Francisco it feels as if I encounter a billion different colors everyday. Looking out a small corner of my bedroom window I count 31 static colors in addition to the ever changing whirl of chroma as cars whizz by on the street. Visual acoustics.

Sound and color are very similar. Both are waves of energy that come from an outside stimulus and enter our body through our orifices…how sexual. Sound can be felt/heard through our skin as the vibrations whizz into our bloodstream and pockets of lymph. Color, too, enters our body in ways besides our eyes as the heavy reflection of white, hot heat off the thick, black asphalt makes us sweat. Rooms painted in red are scientifically proven to elevate our body’s internal temperature and rooms of blue are often calm and cooling.

Color is cacophonous. Too much of too many colors tires us (and our eyes) quickly, but too little variety and too much intensity of one hue can also spur the same effect and prove too intense or too dull.

Occasionally I walk around town with a pair of high density earplugs in. This originally started out as a way to combat the annoyances a laundromat provides through the course of chores, but what I noticed walking back and forth to my apartment, basket in arms, was that as I turned down the volume of the city life, my sight and what I saw became more vivid. Suddenly, I was the guinea pig in my own olfactory science experiment.

Turning off certain stimuli does highlight the other receptors of the body; this is proven by those who are deaf or blind who demonstrate a keen sense of smell.

So, what stimuli can we turn off to highlight that which we desire to experience more of in life?

¶ 2008·02·27