A GLASSINESS TO THE EYES

A Glassiness to the Eyes was created during a residency with the Klondike Institute of Art in Culture in Dawson City and is based on the many stories of animal encounters told to the artist. In many of these stories, the gaze that passes between human and animal plays an important role, the moment when some form of communication passes from one species to another and the story progresses. This visual moment of eyes meeting though seemingly simple, actually belays the deep evolutionary entanglements we have with other animals. The human mind is incredibly adept at noticing eyes looking at it and though we can never be sure of what another creature is thinking, a rapid approximation of what an animal might be thinking could make the difference between surviving an encounter or not—in that moment a flawed by nonetheless functionally successful attempt at inhabiting another being.

A Glassiness to the Eyes began as a simple experiment to see if Google’s Artificial Neural Network (software being developed to recognize the content of images) could approach the human capacity to quickly notice eyes in a complex visual field. Surprisingly, the sophisticated software, confused by the patterns of leaves and light, saw eyes everywhere. This computer generated vision was then combined with the original photograph to create a wallpaper-like composite in which the machine’s reading turns an otherwise simple forest image into an uncanny scene teeming with the gaze of many beings. Both unsettling and energetically alive, it is a reminder of the many ways human perception has been shaped by the non-human forces around us.