The initial inspiration for this project was the idea of amplifying a seemingly insignificant gesture; I chose blinking because it is a gesture that we as humans perform multiple times a minute without considering. This presented an interesting challenge to me: What if the act of blinking could be expanded or harnessed for some kind of benefit, such as documentation? For example, what if I could capture everything I missed while blinking? If this were possible, then I could experience any situation in its totality; I could miss nothing.
The device I built to answer this challenge was a headpiece containing a lever that physically attaches to my right eyelid. My blinking moves the lever in such a way that bridges two contacts on a hacked mouse circuit, connected to my laptop. The consequent “mouse click” asks a short Processing program to grab an image from a live webcam feed. This piece involved several performative walks in which I use the system to experience my environment more fully than the average human.

PHOTOS