Autoscopy – Sit Behind My Eyes

Presented as a part of Transmediale Vorspiel CTM 2016, sit behind my eyes is a virtual reality environment designed to mirror the process of visual perception.

The piece recreates the light, speed and texture of the information penetrating the iris of an eye looking out of a traveling train window. The once overwhelming realism of one of Lumière Brothers’ first films, L’arrivée d’un train, brought together the observer’s gaze and the camera’s eye into the same point, producing one of the first, most affecting moments of cinema history. Overwhelming in a more abstract sense, sit behind my eyes focuses the attention of the viewer into a daydreamer’s perception of a train ride.

”… watched her drifting into that strange no-man’s land where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have sunk beneath the horizon.”

Autoscopie is a virtual reality research group founded by Filiz Avunduk, Mert Akbal and Zeynep Akbal 2015 in Berlin. The focus of our research lies in alteration of mind states through the use of emerging virtual reality and HCI devices. We conceptualize and realize installations, and devise hands-on workshops, in order to gather qualitative data with an artistic and philosophical approach for our research topics. Currently, our work centers around the body, notions of virtual time and space, virtual body swapping, self-perception in virtual worlds, and dreams as a biological form of virtual reality.