lchi-Mask

It is partly an audio visual performance and partly trying to reflect on the famous excerpt from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera that was included in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing TV show. In both works, they are trying to analyse “seeing” and how camera change the way we see.

In the beginning, I approach this project with one question in mind: what does the face tracking algorithm “see”? Trying to escape the tracking with just facial expression (without tilting your head), I squashed and stretched my face as much as possible. Without much success and a solid idea on how to continue, I start remapping the face to find inspiration.

I settled on the cropped eyes because they always look eerie and intriguing to me, the false sense of eye-contact, the information we can extract out of it or project on it. This is a performance of my eyes watching John Berger’s Ways of Seeing introducing Dziga Verrtov’s Man with a Movie Camera, reflecting on what the “mechanical eye” has become, controlling two masks with my two eyes, and trying to make it interesting.

Credits:
Music: Neu! – Super 16
Voice: John Berger – Ways of Seeing