yo, Pgh people
You should go to the Mattress Factory and get loaded into gasworks. It's a sphere and body tray apparatus that's in the lobby of the MF because they're doing a special James Turrell exhibition. He's the guy with the red cube and violet rectangle and black room on the third(?) floor, so if you like those you should definitely go. And if you haven't been to the MF you should probably go now, because I think he's one of their least impenetrable artists.
Anyway gasworks is a ten-minute experience where you get loaded into the sphere, and your visual field is a ganzfeld, flat featureless light. It shifts in color, and there's a bit of strobing. Now, there are a couple of glitches near the apex of the sphere, and the thing to do is defocus your vision, either inwards or outwards. Shifting your distance of vision in a ganzfeld is a very strange feeling, actually -- it isolates your proprioception of your own visual system, since nothing else changes. Sometimes the light is the color of the insides of eyelids, which is a funny thing. At moments the effect is not like seeing at all.
Anyway gasworks is a ten-minute experience where you get loaded into the sphere, and your visual field is a ganzfeld, flat featureless light. It shifts in color, and there's a bit of strobing. Now, there are a couple of glitches near the apex of the sphere, and the thing to do is defocus your vision, either inwards or outwards. Shifting your distance of vision in a ganzfeld is a very strange feeling, actually -- it isolates your proprioception of your own visual system, since nothing else changes. Sometimes the light is the color of the insides of eyelids, which is a funny thing. At moments the effect is not like seeing at all.