All the light you see is from the past. Light and sound take time to travel to us, no matter how close we are to the source. We operate on a sensory input stream of the what-just-happened forever trailing off into memory.

In fact, technically, you can never experience the present. Just the biological lag of processing our own senses takes just long enough to keep us infinitesimally yet definitively separated from now.

Our sensory handle on reality is at the mercy of the mind, which erases our nose from the middle of our vision, fills in two blind spots, makes up things in our peripheral vision and flips the upside-down projections on the backs of our eyeballs right-side up.

The fundamental experiences of our lives are written in our hearts and minds by our eyes and ears. Throughout history, art has explored that relationship and demonstrated an endlessly evolving power to capture attention, change minds, inspire, impact society and imprint on our identity. 

The times we live in are also shaped by science. Our mastery of applying science sculpts our understanding, our capabilities and our imagination. Our technology, from oral history to the printing press to the first photograph, they define and redefine our stories. "The media is the message," says Marshall McLuhan.