carsten höller’s goggles disrupt our sense of orientation
‘The dream is the confusion machine I didn’t have to build,’ Carsten Höller told designboom in our interview back in April, describing his fascination with experiences that interrupt our usual sense of control. For the artist, dreams represent an extraordinary disruption of reality when the mind generates an environment that feels entirely convincing, even as perception becomes unstable and voluntary movement disappears. Höller explores a related uncertainty through his installations, from slides that induce physical vertigo to rotating beds and wearable devices that interfere with how we experience our surroundings.
Höller’s Upside-Down Goggles, first presented in 1994, invert the wearer’s field of vision, making familiar surroundings appear upside down. Simple gestures, such as walking through a room or reaching for an object, suddenly require a different kind of attention. The space may remain the same but moving through it is no longer intuitive.
seeing the world upside-down
Back to the 1890s, American psychologist George M. Stratton wanted to understand how we perceive the world as upright when the image projected onto the retina is inverted. To investigate, he constructed an optical apparatus that reversed his visual field, allowing him to observe how his perception and movements responded to this unfamiliar arrangement. In his first experiment, published in 1896, Stratton wore the apparatus for 21.5 hours over three days. He followed this with a longer investigation in 1897, wearing it for 87 hours over eight days.
As he moved around his garden and through the surrounding village, he recorded the difficulties of coordinating his movements with what he saw. Spatial relationships became unfamiliar, forcing him to rethink how what he could perceive through his sight related to his bodily experience. Stratton’s observations helped establish visual adaptation as a subject of psychological research. His experiment suggested that perception involves more than the passive reception of images and is shaped by the relationship between sight, movement, and experience.
an experiment in perception
Höller describes noticing a slight shift in perception after only five minutes of wearing the goggles. The experience changes considerably when the subject wearing the pair begins to move. Forms seem to slide into one another, while objects appear unexpectedly close or far away. The visual inversion is only part of the effect, as movement alters the apparent relationships between things and makes the surrounding space harder to read.
These observations bring the work back to the relationship between vision and physical experience. We rarely have to think about how we judge a distance, reach for a glass, or step around a chair. Such actions depend on an ongoing coordination between what we see and how we move. The goggles interrupt that coordination, turning familiar gestures into uncertain ones. There is also a difference between adapting to an unfamiliar image and feeling at ease within the world it presents.
Stratton’s experiments explore the changes that could occur over extended periods of inverted vision. Höller’s observations, by contrast, begin with minutes of wearing the device, when perception may start to shift but movement remains unfamiliar. The wearer must act within a world that looks recognizable in its details but no longer behaves as expected. Höller’s goggles make the act of navigating an ordinary space feel newly uncertain. What usually passes unnoticed, the coordination of sight, distance, and movement, becomes the central experience of the work.
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