A Portrait Based on the Physical Appearance: My Face Eating

I wanted to portray myself based on the mechanical process of visual perception in order to make the self-portrait as objective as possible. Adopting the mechanical process of visual perception and getting rid of other context is needed in order to remove my own subjective preconception about myself. And, myself as an artist has to be alienated from myself as a subject in order to observe the subject as it is. *observing with a macro vision *observation 1: a single clip


What Seth talked last week about the motion portraying and its resemblance to the visual perception inspired the process of observing myself. In order to reflect the way other person's visual perception works on my physical appearance, (1)the motion perception, (2)the narrow focus range of human vision, and (3)the saccadic eye movement have been applied to the process of observing my face.

*observation 2: the motion perception and the narrow focus range of human vision

*saccadic eye movements - the trace of the gaze shows the fixations and jumps of eye movements during perceiving/searching the visual information

*observation 3: plus the saccadic eye movement


The resulting portrait consists of 150 video clips which capture the different parts of a face. A subject is eating to make the motion clearer. The layout of video clips does not appear even and this unevenness is based on the saccadic eye movement pattern during watching a human face. The uneven distribution of visual information makes the face to look like a collection of patches with many missing parts. However, this layout also contributes to acquiring more objectivity of a portrait by excluding, in the portrait, the visual cortex's stabilizing process, which fills in the saccadic gap of visual information based on a person's past visual experience and which can add the relativity to the result of portraying.

*projection of the portrait: the alienation of myself as an artist, a subject, and a viewer, and the coincidence of an artist, a subject, and a viewer. :-)

*click for a larger image

** the vertical lines are due to a projector trouble.