helmets

With the Metaperceptual Helmets, we have tried to make a perfect loop of looking and being looked at, the project taking as a starting point the pioneering experiments in perceptual adaptation carried out by psychologist George Malcolm Stratton. Wearing the helmets, the visitor becomes a hybrid creature: part human, part machine, part animal, but also part work of art. A work of art that challenges those who contemplate the helmet - from the inside or from the outside - to take a new perspective on the world.

“I made a hyperstereoscope, using a cardboard tube about a yard long with four little mirrors. With this I could turn myself, in effect, into a creature with eyes a yard apart. I could look through the hyperstereoscope at a very distant object, like the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which normally appeared as a flat semicircle on the horizon, and see it in its full rotundity, projecting towards me.”
—Oliver Sacks. The Mind’s Eye (2010).

“The Irish duo Cleary & Connolly invite is to see through animals eyes with their Metaperceptual Helmets... a unique and astonishing sensorial experience, which questions with intelligence our relationship to the environment, but also to others and to our own inner alien.”
Usbek & Rica, Summer 2016