A video installation, in collaboration with Doug Foster, for Lazarides’s Bedlam exhibition at the Old Vic Tunnels, October 2012. High-definition video recorded via a slit lamp and projected on a 3 metre diameter sphere.

Between sanity and insanity there lies a hinterland where neither description has sense. Ancient, primordial parts of our brains rule here that do not take reasons or refute them, do not calculate or guess, do not believe or disbelieve. Their talk is not in words, their meaning is not in symbols, they have no ears for speech that is not the same in every language. They like to destroy more than to create, to injure than to caress, to kill than to let live. And they have eyes for one thing above all else: the eyes of others.

Queen here is the amygdala, a piece of brain folded deep beneath the cortex. It directs us, silently, unconsciously, to look for eyes in the world around us. It does not care if they are dark or light, large or small, hot or cold, it does not care about the part of them that sees – the pupil – but only about its frame: the “whites”. For this is where fear is manifest, and fear is what feeds the amygdala, what lets it arrogate powers that normally lie elsewhere: in the sane, kind, civilised part of us.

So here we give the amygdala what it wants. We create a fear superstimulus, a hanging giant sphere onto which a hyper-real video of an eye is projected, lidless, its whites exposed. We give you fear in an eyeful of pixels.

One irony of the piece is that what actually matters is not the pupil or the iris, the “interesting” parts of the eyes, but the seemingly most boring – the whites. And the effect of the the whites is not in the veins etc, though they do add reality, but just that they are white – this is where the explanation stops, for this is as far as the effect goes neurally. Exposing the whites of an eye flicks a switch in the brain, whether one likes it or not, it is just how we are made, and there is nothing one can do about it. Following Francis Bacon’s line “emotion without the boredom of its conveyance” this is as minimal and direct a conveyance as one can get.

 

Video by Doug Foster, photos by Ian Cox.