Instruments of Vision

Abstract

In the age of ubiquitous visual technologies and systems, our perceptive apparatuses are constantly challenged, adapted, and shaped by instruments and machines, rendering the observing body as an active site of knowledge. Your Eye's Motion by Luna is an interactive installation that uses real-time eye-tracking to control a robotic creature named Luna (Figure 1). Materializing eye movements through a wondrous spectacle of light, motion, and color, the observer becomes conscious of her gaze enacted and extended by a robotic counterpart. Building on a diverse set of theories and understandings of vision from the fields of cybernetics, visual studies, embodied mind, and more, the project explores how our perceptual apparatuses and bodies are reconfigured in relation to machines and the environment to afford new ways of seeing. Once we see how observing bodies accommodate feedback from actions to cognition, we can uncover the embodied and affective potential of eye movement as an interface for robotics. The curiosity of Luna invests in this potential, articulating a unity between our embodied percepts and machinic environments to create a "vision machine."