Aberrance, photo essay by Jack Yong
[A]berrance is an introspective and interpersonal look on the inextricable relationship within fragmented nature and artifice, and the human role within this dialectic. Meandering through the Cloud Forest at Singapore transformed my perception; engendering exploration and interrogation on the duality of the real and imagined, summoning a re-evaluation on both utilitarian aesthetic and function simultaneously.The methodology considers the dichotomy of invisibility with physicality. The invisibility is the artificiality. Infrared photography was used remotely by surveyors, enabling them to discover the “unseen” of the physical. Guided by this method, I allure the attention of the gazers to correlate their senses of the physical and artificial through a paradoxically virtual representation. By altering the phenotype of the forest visually utilising this technique, I’m able to relate the conceivable alteration of the homogeneity of the subject, as a metaphoric rendition to the susceptible artificiality of the forest.
The divergent of the forest normalcy was a cognitive process to subvert attuned gaze towards the invisible. This invisibility is represented by the intangible confinement of these subtle species amongst the sophisticated glass biomes. The shift in perception and periphery of view evoke a sense of semantic wonder and lateral thinking; forcing internal interlocution, heightening one’s consciousness. As quoted by Alan Watts, our grasp on reality is better when we look at it from the standpoints of different cultures, and the comparison brings to light aspects of one’s own point of view so basic as to have been ignored. (Jack Yong)
