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.
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: