Lidiia Volodymyrivna Starodubtseva, a cultural historian, art curator, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, professor, and head of the Department of Media Communications at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, led a brainstorming seminar called “Visual Signs” at the “Tvorche Nezhyt” art gallery. We are publishing her reflections on the event.
Despite the war. Despite the sirens. Despite everything.
Today, I held my brainstorming seminar “Visual Signs” at the “Tvorche Nezhyt” art gallery. How long do you think a modern person, with our so-called “clip thinking,” can look at a visual image? Three seconds? Thirty? A minute? It feels like in the Instagram era, we have simply lost the skill of deep focus: instead of truly “peering,” we surf in a scattered, flickering, superficial way.
Perhaps that is why, a couple of weeks ago, my dear and charismatic art curator colleague at “Tvorche Nezhyt,” Magran, and I decided to conduct an experiment. The idea is straightforward: we project a reproduction of a painting onto the screen and look at it for a long time, as if not “at” the image but “through” it, then share our interpretations in a search for encoded meanings and hidden insights. It turns out to be an unusual, captivating experience! The entire universe around seems to slow down and quiet, the tempo of existence fades away, and you find yourself in another, metaphysical dimension.
Interestingly, around the same time, The New York Times summarized the results of a similar experiment involving almost 10,000 respondents on the other side of the planet. Each participant was asked to spend 10 minutes looking at the same painting (James Whistler’s “Nocturne in Blue and Silver”). They could zoom in to examine details, and there was a “I give up” button. Most couldn’t last even two seconds. Among those who did last, 25% gave up after just one minute. Another 25% managed to keep looking at the painting, uninterrupted, for the full 10 minutes. One person who completed the experiment recalled that the first two minutes were painful, difficult, and unbearable. Yet the more she observed, the more details she noticed, and the stronger the pull became to immerse herself in that other universe — on the other side of the screen. It was magic, meditation, a purely visual pleasure.
Today we tried the same approach. I’m not sure what the other participants felt, but as for me, I had the impression that it wasn’t us interpreting the visual signs but rather the signs were interpreting us, altering our ability to see “through.”
When I got home, it was the same again: sirens blaring, news flickering in Telegram, hundreds of photos, thousands of words. Have I already lost the ability to peer into the depths again?
I’m sincerely grateful to Magran Tata for the invitation and to everyone who joined this experiment, with special thanks to Dmitry Petrenko and Maryna Chaika for the photographs.
