Mirror 36 | “Transpires” Exhibit
For London-based cinematographer/art professor Gerry McCulloch and American social sculptor Betsy McCall, EyeDirect was central to their latest creation. They set out to “create a portrait space that subtly foregrounds the innermost states of sitters; a space in which we can locate ourselves in the infinite diversity of others and locate others in the infinite diversity of ourselves. . . . Participants are filmed from a seemingly impossible angle within the axis of eye contact between partners.”
The artists created cinema-quality slow-motion portraits filmed while the subject is holding eye contact with a stranger via an EyeDirect Mark II, which allowed them to film “from inside the intimate spaces of subjects.” The video above provides a behind-the-scenes look at their process shooting close to 250 portraits over 8 days in India. Other portraits were filmed in a studio in England. The result is as a “cinematic face bath in the form of an immersive projection-mapped art installation.”
A Mirror interaction “dissolves boundaries of language, religion, politics, ethnicity, age, gender, socio-economic status and personal sovereignty,” prompting participants to comment, “It should be mandatory for heads of state to participate in this project,” and “This project brings us a step closer to world peace.” We hadn’t previously considered that EyeDirect might be capable of contributing to world peace, but in the hands of our talented customers, anything is possible.
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March 2019 installation of Mirror in London, UK
The installation ran in March 2019 at Goldsmith’s University of London.
Gerry is planning a new project for which he’s asked Steve McWilliams for an EyeDirect with even larger viewing surface area than the Mark II, currently the largest model available. Steve agreed to provide a prototype for Gerry to use on the project, which we’ll be following closely.
Learn more about the artists and their Mirror project: