Vision strongly influences our perception. Examples are the McGurk effect, an auditory illusion where the visual component of speech clearly influences what a person hears; or the famous experiments conducted in 2001 by Brochet and Dubourdieu, involving 57 wine experts, in which every one of them failed to notice that it was actually a white wine with an odorless red dye what they were asked to rate as a red wine.

Further off senses, images enjoy the power of acting as a kind invitation, a call to mind, of more abstract ideas. In geometry, the most visual part of mathematics, the flow of reasoning can generally be followed by looking at images. Elsewhere in the sciences and the arts, production of explanatory, enlightning, summarizing pictures are often the basis of a successfull spread.

Currently, technology is working in optimal displays to make the power of vision even stronger.

Displays are indeed the material interface in which the invisible gets converted into the visible. They provide graphical interpretations of realities beyond the capacity of our senses. For example, most information in the non-visible regions of the spectrum, from the gamma and X-ray to the radiowave, is translated into the visible, incorporating the nanoworld and the astronomical world – from the ultra-small and the ultra-large, and from the ultra-fast and the ultra-slow – into human-scale perception. Displaying artistic images of phenomena that are not encountered in the macroscopic world, such as the operation of the intra-cellular molecular machinery, opens the imagination to a whole new world.

In a connected world, where technology struggles every day to store and transmit bigger, faster loads of information, within a knowledge-based society depending on its capacity of aquiring, integrating, and distributing such information, the massive and global wiring of data might be rendered incomplete without an appropriate canvas to display it at the other side.

A good canvas does not necessarily imply a high resolution, as the power of images does not always lie in being an exact representation of reality.