Outside the Visible

This is not a description of an acid trip or the effects of shrooms, this is just the typical trippy lens I see the world through and some of the shit that gets processed through my fucked-up head, and this particular rabbit hole starts with the uncomfortable fact that there is shit directly in front of you right now that you cannot see.

I don't mean ghosts, spirits, demons or anything else that requires you to decide what you believe before we get started, I'm talking about light, something we know is there, something we can measure and can detect with equipment, yet an enormous portion of it passes through the world without becoming part of the picture your eyes hand your brain. Human eyes get access to a small section of what's available, with infrared extending beyond one end of what we can see and ultraviolet extending beyond the other, and I've always loved the arrogance buried inside the phrase “visible spectrum” since what we're really describing is the part visible to us, as if everything outside our biological specifications somehow doesn't count.

Cameras and sensors can detect information our eyes completely miss, so none of that invisible shit suddenly appeared when we invented equipment capable of finding it, it had been occupying the same physical world right in front of us long before we developed another way to look.

Our own equipment gets stranger around the edges, since peripheral vision doesn't behave exactly like the center of our visual field, with detail changing as you move outward, color sensitivity changing and the brain collecting information from an area much larger than whatever happens to be sitting directly in front of your face. Research has shown that peripheral color information can contribute to locating things during visual search, and under very specific laboratory conditions researchers have demonstrated that humans can perceive infrared laser light beyond our ordinary visual range through a process involving two photon absorption in the retina.

I'm not going to bullshit you and pretend I understand the physics well enough to teach it, but I understand enough to appreciate how fucking strange the result is when reduced to plain English: light sitting outside the range humans ordinarily see reached the visual system under the right conditions and people perceived it, which leaves our comfortable little definition of what humans can see with a few more cracks in it than most of us probably knew were there.

Dig backward a few thousand years and the whole subject takes a turn I wasn't expecting, since I went looking for ancient descriptions of people catching spirits out of the corners of their eyes and couldn't verify that claim, which would have made for some spectacularly creepy material but isn't something I'm willing to manufacture to make this article work.

The material I could verify turned out to be better anyway, with ancient writers wrestling repeatedly with the limitations of direct sight and the idea that certain things couldn't be observed the same way ordinary physical objects could. Iamblichus used an analogy involving our inability to look directly toward the gods in the same way the eye cannot stare directly into the sun, ancient Jewish and early Christian traditions carried their own descriptions of heavenly reality existing beyond normal human sight, Ephesians spoke about rulers, authorities, cosmic powers and spiritual forces that weren't flesh and blood, and Gnostic traditions got considerably deeper into the weeds with archons, rulers or powers occupying their own place inside a cosmology where the physical world available to human senses wasn't necessarily the complete picture. Ancient Egypt had its own enormous system involving gods, the dead and an entire realm beyond ordinary physical life, filled with beings, dangers and forces that weren't waiting around like furniture for human eyesight to inspect.

None of this means an archon is hiding in the infrared spectrum, an Egyptian priest was catching ghosts in his peripheral vision or ancient people had secretly figured out retinal physiology thousands of years ahead of everybody else, and there is no scientific evidence allowing me to make any of those claims without turning an interesting rabbit hole into complete bullshit. The part I can't get past is how people without any knowledge of rods, cones, retinal structure, electromagnetic radiation or wavelengths got close enough to the experience of visual limitation to build entire bodies of language around things that couldn't be sensed normally or directly.

They couldn't point an infrared camera into the darkness and compare its image with what their naked eyes reported, yet they lived with darkness in a form most of us rarely experience anymore, along with firelight, stars, shadows, animals moving beyond the center of their gaze and long ass stretches of night without streetlights, TV, phones or LEDs pumping light into every corner of their environment. Their explanations belonged to the cultures they lived inside, but the hardware producing whatever they experienced was human hardware, with the same basic retinal architecture and many of the same limitations carried around inside our own heads.

How the fuck did they get that close?

There doesn't need to be a supernatural answer hiding underneath the question for it to be fascinating, since ancient people didn't need scientific vocabulary to become intimately familiar with what their own senses did under different conditions. A person sitting near a fire three thousand years ago didn't need to know what a rod cell was to learn that movement at the edge of the visual field behaved differently from something placed directly under the gaze, and nobody needed a lesson in electromagnetic radiation to learn that darkness contained activity their eyes couldn't fully resolve.

Human beings could accumulate generations of experiences involving peripheral movement, dreams and altered states produced through religious ritual, attaching explanations to those experiences that made sense inside their cultures without understanding any of the biology underneath them. Seen from that angle, the intriguing possibility isn't that ancient people possessed lost scientific knowledge, it's that they became extremely familiar with the experience of their own perceptual limitations long before anybody understood the machinery producing them.

I had all this shit rattling around in my head during the Golden State Tattoo Expo this weekend, where I could circulate through an area I had already covered and still catch an artist or piece of work that I could have sworn wasn't there on the previous pass. There was far too much packed into the same space for any pair of eyes to absorb, and changing the direction of my attention changed the version of the show I was seeing even though almost nothing about the show itself had changed.

It's weird, but I'm sure a lot of you could relate, for example…… you have an artist sitting a few feet from you for an hour, well, maybe not an hour, that would be weird, I'm a lot of things, but stalker is not one of them, lol, ok, lost my thought, oh yeah, so before their work entered my attention, and there was something almost crazy obvious about the lesson buried inside that, since their existence had absolutely nothing to do with whether I happened to be looking in their direction. Man, I hope I'm explaining this right? Fuck it! Keep reading, you'll get it if you don't at this point.

Shrink that exact problem into the screen of a phone and tattoo discovery starts looking pretty fucking ridiculous, with thousands upon thousands of artists scattered across cities, states and countries doing work that can become incredibly specific, yet a huge amount of our ability to discover them has been handed to platforms responsible for deciding whether our next few seconds should belong to a tattoo, cheeseburger, celebrity, vacation picture or whatever stupid shit happens to be fighting for the same piece of screen.

An artist twenty miles away could be doing exactly the work you've had inside your head for six years and have three thousand followers, terrible reels and absolutely no interest in spending half the day figuring out how to entertain the Engagement Gods, leaving exceptional work almost completely absent from the version of tattooing delivered to your phone despite the artist being every bit as real, talented and geographically close as the people the machine keeps putting in front of you.

All of that infrared, peripheral vision, ancient Egyptian and archon shit starts making an odd kind of sense when placed next to what we're building at Inker, since there isn't much value in creating another brighter center and fighting to shove every artist into it when the far more interesting territory sits around the edges. An artist can be big-time relevant to a particular collector without being remotely important to the rest of the internet, and understanding tattooing deeply gives us the ability to look at style, geography, artists, collectors, bunch of other shit and all the tiny distinctions inside this culture that a platform built to understand billions of people has little reason to care about.

A tattoo artist with three thousand followers isn't less relevant than one with three hundred thousand when the smaller artist is the person capable of producing exactly what a particular collector has been hunting for, which makes popularity a pretty shitty substitute for relevance once you stop staring exclusively at the center.

Calling Inker a discovery platform would probably be the normal way to describe it, but after going this far into invisible light, peripheral vision, ancient gods and archons, my fucked up head sees a different picture, something closer to a peripheral lens built specifically for tattooing, tuned farther toward the edges where incredibly talented artists can sit outside the industry's brightest field of attention without being outside the industry itself. There's a slightly trippy “soothsayer” quality to that idea that I fucking love, with the technology getting better at reading a very specific world instead of trying to understand everything on the internet, finding connections between collectors and artists that don't require either of them to become famous first.

Human beings were wrestling with the limitations of sight thousands of years before we had instruments capable of showing exactly how limited those eyes were, and the artists sitting outside the bright little patch of tattooing delivered to our phones aren't fundamentally different from anything else that exists beyond a narrow field of view. Their work doesn't become better when we discover it, their talent doesn't switch on when an algorithm gives them reach and their relevance to the right collector doesn't begin when a follower counter gets large enough to attract attention. They were there before the lens found them, and Inker will continue to fine tune its proprietary mojo and as a direct result, we're going to build a fucking lens capable of seeing farther into tattoo culture to support artist at another level!

J Gekko
Staff Writer, Inker