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Peripheral Horizon 
Adam Thompson
6.28.2026-8.15.2026

Nine exercises exploring vision:

  1. Close your eyes and observe the light that passes through your eyelids. Observe what else appears.
  2. With your eyes open, soften your focus and observe the space around you using your peripheral vision. Find the curve of the edges between your central and peripheral vision.
  3. Focus to the left of a straight edge. Allow yourself to see it as curved. Try focusing on the right side of the edge.
  4. Spend time observing your surroundings, noticing the emotions they elicit. Then, soften your focus and observe using your peripheral vision. What new emotions arise?
  5. Pick an object in your peripheral vision. Without shifting your gaze, spend time clarifying your image of it. Now, look at the chosen object and compare with what you saw a moment prior.
  6. Spend time focusing on another object in your surroundings. Observe the scale at which it appears in your visual field. Now look elsewhere, placing that object in your periphery. Does it remain the same size?
  7. Move around. Make a distinction between the reality of the physical space surrounding you and the construction of space that appears in your mind.
  8. Interrogate how much of your vision is made up of memory.
  9. Ask, how might one change upon changing the way one sees? How might seeing differently change the way one reckons with reality?



One’s visual world is an amalgam of imagery from one’s surroundings, memory and imagination. Seeing today also means experiencing a barrage of manmade photographs, videos and renderings. Manmade images are so captivating that they begin to supplant one’s internal experience, becoming a lens through which the world is experienced. They inform how one sees oneself, relates to others and locates oneself in time and space. They create uniformity of vision. One may choose to see differently.





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