Solarception: Not seeing blue in a second sense in the eye

"A major discovery in sensory physiology has gone virtually unnoticed. It involves a very thin slice of blue synching humans and other mammals with the Sun. Blue isn't seen but sensed by a third retinal cell. Rods and cones have been around forever, but it was not until the 1990s that intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) became known. They function as nothing less than a second sense in the eye, which joins the ear in harbouring two senses. Because ipRGCs dies on the tongue, I call them solar retinal cells or solar retinals, and their corresponding sense, solarception. A clock is the wrong image for the circadian because solarception is a spatial relation–an individual's position in the solar system–not a temporal one, let alone a mechanistic device. What naming might do, why it has to be ecological, and how Plato's extramission, the eye emitting light, helps, will be discussed."

Douglas Kahn is Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, and Professor Emeritus at University of California at Davis and University of New South Wales. Books include Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT, 1999), Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California, 2013), and Energies in the Arts (MIT, 2019). In collaboration with Dr. Pia van Gelder (ANU), his current project is The Energies Artists Say.

The ticket price includes a donation for one free drink at the seminar.

This seminar is presented by Modern Art Projects Blue Mountains as part of the Aerie exhibition at Wentworth Falls School of Arts which is supported by the Blue Mountains City Council and the Blue Mountains City of the Arts Trust.

For more information about Aerie, please visit https://www.modernartprojects.org/project/aerie-exhibition-celebrates-school-of-arts-and-mapbm.