The eyes have it in super-sized show

The Institute of Contemporary Art's splashy new digs along the waterfront, originally set to open this month, will now open later in the fall. If we could see into the future, we'd know what its first major exhibition, ``Super Vision," would be like. But as much as technology has altered and enhanced the way we look at things -- one of the major themes of ``Super Vision" -- it has yet to allow us to glimpse that far.

The show's title can be read two ways, says the ICA's chief curator, Nicholas Baume . ``First, there's super. Super powers, Superman's X-ray vision. This is a look at what has happened to technologies of vision. We now do have superhuman vision.

``The flip side," he continues, ``is supervision. Surveillance. Being looked at. What does that mean for personal freedom and identity?"

Baume has tapped 27 contemporary artists of international stature, including James Turrell , Mona Hatoum , Anish Kapoor , Jeff Koons, and Ed Ruscha , for an exhibition more ambitious in size and scope than the ICA could ever have previously mounted.

``Super Vision" starts off caressing the optic nerve.

``Rather than looking at a painting with vanishing- point perspective, you have to move around the art physically in order to see and understand it," says Baume. ``We have works that twist space, that divide and replicate it, that go seamlessly from inside to outside."

Artists in this group include light artist Turrell, sculptor Kapoor (whose 35-foot, concave ``Sky Mirror" opens in Rockefeller Center this fall), and Op artist Bridget Riley .

Next stop: Technology as a vision prosthetic.

``We move from things that make you question what you're seeing to work where vision is disembodied," says Baume. As an example, he points to Hatoum's video installation of images taken with an endoscopic camera traveling through her own body. Harun Farocki's film ``Eye/Machine" looks at new technologies replacing human vision, from facial-recognition software to industrial quality-control systems, and wonders if human vision is becoming obsolete.

The third section questions how we locate ourselves.

``The way we see the world around us is shifting," Baume says. ``The first view of earth from outer space in 1968 was a turning point in how we think of our own location. Now we have a globally networked sense of our place in the world. We have microvision, macrovision, Internet images, security images."

Jeff Wall's intricately detailed giant photograph, ``Concrete Ball," for instance, shows how much more information digital imaging technology provides than the naked eye.

``Super Vision" wraps up with visceral responses to where new technology can take us: delight and terror.

``The new vision is pleasurable -- it's extraordinary, the things we are able to see," says Baume. ``At the same time, the image world is bombarding us, and there's a threat that this sea of imagery is not based anymore on human experience. Everything digital does not relate to human vision the way analog technologies did.

``How do we fit," he asks, ``into this superhuman world at once familiar and outside our grasp? There's a greater connectedness. At the same time, we have lost control of our images."

As a curator, of course, it's Baume's job to put those images in order. And all eyes will be on how he does it with this show.

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