'Disembodied Gaze' (2013) 3:05 mins
Instructions: Use headphones.
Disembodied Gaze (2013) Katriona Beales from Katriona Beales on Vimeo.
'Disembodied Gaze' consists of a single source digital photograph, the coding of which has been manipulated to create hundreds of versions which were then animated. The source image shows a massive bloodied eyeball cradled in cupped hands, and was originally from a news story about a giant eyeball found washed up on a beach in Florida. Over the fluctuating supersaturated colours of the corrupted image, my voice whispers an extract from 'The Magic Mountain' by Mann describing the act of watching a film in a cinema. In this work I contrast the act of looking in the context of the digital with the cinematic experience. The disembodied giant eye suggests the detached and somehow bodiless experience of parsing multiple channels of information at the same time on the Internet, contrasting with the seduction of the cinema.