Offline Eye / Wi-Fi Organs, Out of Body Experience

Offline-Eye

We don’t need to resurrect McLuhan to notice whole armies of technological prosthetics surrounding us. If we stay on a symbolic level there are countless, but even if we restrict our search to the corporeal level there are still a lot. With an aesthetic that can all too easily be ascribed to the ‘cyberpunk’ imaginary, the work Offline Eye / Wi-Fi Organs by Wu Juehui consists of a pair of converted Video Glasses. These come equipped with a 3D printed spherical camera that transmits via Wi-Fi to the video glasses. The spherical camera is programmed to “fall every 30 seconds”. The artist is technically trying to answer the question: “what if our eyeball could leave our body but continue to transmit information?” The answer is not clear, but the artist suggests some possible test subjects, such as carrying the camera in one’s hand or throwing it in the water, or from the top of a skyscraper, producing an intense “out-of-body” experience. Wherever it goes, the wearer will feel a dislocated presence, unconfirmed by the rest of his body. This creation of a close but free-to-move visual prosthetic is totally novel. Conceptually it could be defined as a reverse engineered drone. The user has relative control over the eye, but the lens goes down, never up, providing ‘falling’ or ‘profound’ visions, which ultimately tend to mean closer and detailed, instead of aerial and panoramic. And this kind of spatially extended vision is not necessarily ‘empowering’ for the individual, although it certainly expands his visual field, and in turn his perception of reality. Offline Eye is part of Juehui‘s Organs Project, comprising other devices which extend our senses at the same time as limiting them through the constrains of their own ‘heavy’ technology, and in a way alluding to the ultimate limitations of our wish to technologically extend our senses.

 

  • Offline Eye / WiFi Organs, Wu Juehui, NYC 2014 (Full Version)
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  • Organs Project – WU Juehui 器官计划 – 吴珏辉
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