Eye Mac

2002

This piece has gotten around. It sat in the storefront window of a video rental shop called Leather Tongue in San Francisco. At one time it was in two places at once, 5000 miles apart on different continents; Malmö, Sweden and San Francisco, California in the US. The Swedish National Art Council bought the work after the Malmö show. At one of my open studio events, a visitor just said, "Your work is too conceptual for my taste." Fair enough. It hung in YLEM's 20th anniversary show, and before all that, I had it running in my own apartment window in the Tenderloin. Just to see what happened.

I got hooked on these old machines back in college. I found a storeroom full of late 1980s computers that nobody wanted. So I started experimenting with them. I painted one orange and put a Jack-O-Lantern animation in it for Halloween. I wrote a program for them that used the I Ching to tell your fortune. I once almost shocked myself to death with one of them too. I took off the casing and touched the capacitor connected to the CRT screen. I learned that lesson fast! The technology was already ancient then, and the programming language I used, Hypercard, is a long dead programming language and was it was obsolete even back then. That's part of why I was so fascinated and obsessed with the project. Working with outdated tech forces you to think differently. Eventually I landed on the idea that became Eye Mac. It's my eye, inside an Apple Macintosh computer. Also it's a pun on the iMac which was a popular computer when I was showing these.

It's archival, collectible, but also very hard to look away from. That jittery eye keeps moving, and it can't be ignored. Someone at a show once said, "It sucks you into its own head trip." That stuck with me. Like any art, you'll bring your own meaning to it. But if you want mine, here it is:

Concept

Descartes drew a line that wasn't really there and separated the mind from the body. He turned the body into a machine and the mind into the operator pulling the levers. In doing so, he birthed the Scientific Revolution. But that split came at a cost.

Ever since, creative and spiritual people have been trying to sew the two back together. Artists, therapists, spiritual leaders, and anyone who's ever felt like a ghost driving a meat suit. I'm attempting this repair on myself by putting my own body back into the machine. But like Frankenstein's monster, you can see the stitches and the result is more disturbing than elegant.

Method

There is no video camera attached to this computer. Just an eye looking back at you. It's part Duchamp-style rectified readymade and part 'multimedia' installation. I picked this particular model of computer because it's a tank. While testing it, I ran it nonstop for three months straight. I programmed it so that when you turn it on, it runs without user intervention.

I programmed a Hypercard application to play random short loops of my eye moving. I filmed my eye in different states; tired, focused, darting, and staring back at you. I whittled each motion down to four or five key frames. I then dropped the resolution to 512 by pixels 342 and changed it to black and white to fit the old screen. I arranged the frames across sequential Hypercard "cards" to create a chain of loops whose sequence never repeats.