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A Priori Vision

Designing Perception Before the Screen
Overview

A Priori Vision: The Transcendence of Pre-ontological Sight (MIT · Art, Culture & Technology) interrogates an impossible design problem: how to externalize a form of vision that precedes objects, language, and screens. Rather than treating vision as image reception, the project reframes perception as a biological, performative system—one that constructs meaning through motion, memory, and peripheral awareness before conscious attention arrives. The insight was radical but precise: perception itself can operate as a display medium. To test this, the work manifested as immersive cinematic installations driven by live EEG signals, custom electromechanical systems, projected narrative film, and temporal sound artifacts. Watching the system altered it, collapsing observer and interface into a single feedback loop. The impact established a conceptual foundation for biologically encoded augmented reality, repositioning AR from graphical overlay to perceptual multiplexing. This work argues that the future of experience design doesn’t add to reality—it rewires how reality is felt, sensed, and understood.

Challenge

How do you design for vision before the user knows they’re seeing?

Most visual systems assume attention is the entry point.

Focus. Gaze. Objects. Frames.

But human perception doesn’t work that way.

Before attention locks in, before meaning stabilizes, the visual system is already alive with motion, memory, prediction, and peripheral processing. The challenge was to externalize that pre-ontological layer of vision—to design an experience that operates before language, before symbols, before interfaces.

In other words:

How do you build an experience that exists ahead of awareness?

Insight

Vision is a dynamic system — not a static image.

The breakthrough came from reframing vision as a feedback loop, not a pipeline.

Perception isn’t something the world gives us.

It’s something the body actively performs.

By working with non-conceptual vision, peripheral awareness, motion-induced perception, and neural feedback, the project revealed a powerful idea:

Meaning can be delivered without occupying the center of the screen — or the center of attention.

This reframing laid the conceptual groundwork for biologically encoded AR and cinematic UX systems where motion, rhythm, and timing become the message.

Execution

A cinematic system where perception drives the narrative.

The work materialized as a series of immersive installations and live performances where the act of seeing powered the experience itself:

  • A projected cinematic sequence (Ballard’s Giant) dissecting scale, memory, and embodiment
     

  • EEG-driven electromechanical sculptures animated by live neural activity from the visual cortex
     

  • Mechanical systems that advanced, inscribed, or silenced themselves in response to perception
     

  • Archival audio layered as temporal artifacts, collapsing past and present into a single perceptual moment
     

  • A performative loop where watching altered the system, and alteration changed what could be seen next
     

There was no passive viewer.

The audience’s perception was the engine.

Impact

A precursor to cinematic UX and biologically encoded AR.

  • Archived and presented at MIT as a cross-disciplinary fusion of art, neuroscience, and computation
     

  • Direct conceptual predecessor to later doctoral work on peripheral semantics and biologically encoded augmented reality
     

  • Reframed AR not as an overlay of graphics, but as a reprogramming of perceptual bandwidth
     

  • Anticipated contemporary design conversations around attention-aware systems, cinematic interaction, and motion-first interfaces
     

This project quietly answered a question that’s now unavoidable:

What if the most powerful interface isn’t the screen — but the human nervous system?

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