Something Similar to Me / About Seeing Things
Akihiko Taniguchi

1.
This video is rendered in real-time on a computer,and shown in sync with the time in the real world.
The 3D image of “myself” was created with a 3D scanner,and the texture that covers the body was filmed in February 2016.
And now it is you who can operate that "I" of February 10, 2016.

2.
When looking into a mirror, we cannot look at the mirror itself.
If we don’t avoid looking at the mirror itself when looking into it,
we cannot see the things reflected in the mirror.
To look at one thing means at once to avoid looking at something else.
Therefore, in order to look at something,
we must forget the doubts this may involve for the moment,
and get absorbed in the very thing we look at.

3.
I sometimes fold the corners of pages in books that I readto mark the locations of things
that particularly caught my attention.
This happened also when reading a bookthat I had bought in a used bookstore the other day.
I was going to fold the corner, when I realized thatthe previous owner had folded the corner of the same page.
So I folded the corner along the existing crease.
Imagining how the previous owner’s thoughts while readingwere partly repeated in myself via the crease,
I felt kind of awkward.
When living at a certain place for a certain amount of time,
there are things that one feels unable to throw awaypiling up along with one’s memories.
Because of the things that are there,
even the most trifling memories come back through those things.
There are fetishists that buy worn female underwear

and apparently enjoy warming it in a microwave.
The underwear turns into some sort of recording mediumthat is warmed in a microwave with the aim to“play back” its state immediately after undressing.
This is a pile of laundry at my house.

4.
When reading Hosaka Kazushi’s novel Conversation Piece,
I noticed the following paragraph:
When I look at clouds
it is the clouds that make me “look,”
and it is the clouds that make “me as I look.”
The clouds exist even if I don’t look,and they exist even if I don’t.
Likewise, “looking” exists even if I’m not looking.
It happened to me several times in the pastthat I went outside, but after walking for a whilebegan to worry whether I had locked the door,
so I went back to see.
However it didn’t happen a single time that I went backand actually found that I had forgotten to lock the door.
So these days I’m no longer going back to check the door.
As I (we) did return to check whether
I (we) had locked the door several times in the past,
now I no longer have to worry about the door.
Everything we see on a computer screen
appears there as a result of some kind of calculation.
So it is possible to enhance the efficiency of calculation
by skipping the calculation of parts that are not visible.
The processing in 3D computer games can be made more efficient
By such methods as omitting the depiction of backsidesof objects that cannot be seen from the user’s perspective,
or eliminating objects that are far in the background.

5.
When looking up to the sky on a sunny day,one can sometimes see some kind of debris
like a lint in one’s eye.

This phenomenon called eye floater appears when
wrinkles or loose tissue floating on the vitreous body of the eyeballare projected onto the retina.
This means that we see the scenery outside
and our own eyeballs at the same time.
We cannot see other people’s eye floaters though.

6.
To perceive light means perhaps to see.
Like many other phenomena,
the phenomenon of light takes some time
as it is transmitted through space.
The light of Betelgeuse, a star in the constellation of Orion,
Is reaching our eyes after having traveled for 640 years.
The moonlight that illuminates the scenery right now
was reflected from the moon’s surface 1.28 seconds ago.
The distance between a phenomenon and myself results
in a time lag between the phenomenon and my perception of it.
This means that the things that I am seeing right now
are in fact scattered things of the past.
Seeing is not something that exists because I’m doing it actively,
but it probably comes into being the moment the times ofseveral scattered places are transmitted in the form of light,
which then happen to intersect right where I am.

7.
When scanning an object three-dimensionally with a 3D scanner,
the textures and undulations on its surface are recordedby rotating the object or walking around it.
Scanning things with a 3D scanner is thus likerecording accumulations of previous “views” from various angles.
This is how 3D data obtained through 3D scanningare created by collecting multiple views from different angles.
When looking at such 3D data now,the data exist as something seen by someone else before,
and I can only “see” them because
all the scattered views of the past overlap with my own view.