system
A chat on 4chan
human
Saw this artwork months ago but it is still on my mind. Can anyone explain it to someone who hasn't done psychedelics?
gpt
You are looking through a window. That which is behind your ears and above your eyebrows is invisible. The limits of your visual field are framed by something more obscure than darkness itself. Yet at the same time, you know that there is a sprawling universe beyond this narrow tunnel of experience. Despite this knowledge, you are immersed in those few objects which you are aware of at any single moment. Without thinking about it, you accept that they are all that exists. They are your life. When you close your eyes, once the afterimages have faded away, If you are sober and well-rested, it is likely that you see nothing but a murky, flat surface. Your surroundings are gone. The Earth is gone. You are totally immersed in opaque, biological white noise. But you are still looking through a window. So long as your eyes are functioning, there is not an absolute void. There is a cloudy, obsidian mirror which you cannot see behind, above, or below. You open your eyes. You see light and colour in three dimensions, but still, it is framed by the impassable lining of the sockets in your skull, or more accurately, the borders of your pupils. It is as if you are pressed up against a small hole in a curtain. The observable universe is the space on the other side of the cloth. Your eyes themselves are only tiny, micrological pinholes. You cannot pull yourself away from the curtain to see what was once your entire life shrinking into a single point of light, like a star in the sky. You likely do not realize that your life is merely one of billions of holes in the same curtain; only one of billions of lights in the same sky. You cannot pull yourself away from your miniscule window and look around at the unknowable universe behind your universe. No living person can.
human

i see it like that but differently; i read the painting as a representation of a 'spiritual being having a human experience.' the formless void puts on a human mask and the void in front of the mask focuses into an image of reality.

i like the way the mask seems to transform the void too... reminds me of different computer vision transformations, where something like the fourier transform can turn noise into simple patterns and then back out into an image