Autoscopic Space Re-thinking the Limits Between Self and Self-Image

Abstract

An experimental installation project of my own making, the diplorasis, aims to re-think the human sensorium by considering the bodily perceptual boundaries that are induced by visual media processes. Within the installation space the participant will, unexpectedly, encounter stereoscopic projections of himself/herself from previous instances and multiple perspectives. The photographic cameras within the device that are attached to sensors have been programmed to capture different views of the moving participant, and then to digitally split (and in some cases manipulate) the images before sending them to screens that project the image for the participant’s view. These stereoscopic images induce an illusionistic three-dimensional projection of the subject.

The reduplicated, projected, and three-dimensionally simulated self in the diplorasis begins to trigger a questioning of how the body is understood within visual media. During the visual experience one has a solipsistic perception of oneself. The participant views himself both from outside and inside his body. The out-of-body experience of observing oneself from the multiple points of view of another (as a simulated object) is somehow countered to the embodied operation of the physical binocular eyes. The uncanny closeness of a neutral image “out there” (e.g. of a house) evoked by the original stereoscopes is now subverted, as the digitization of the stereoscope allows for unexpected self projections of the viewer. The diplorasis brings to the fore a particular reading of a sensory body that veers between, on the one hand, a projected image generated by electronic information, and on the other, the embodied response to this projected spectral other. As electronic processes are changing the perceptual and cognitive limits of the body, how do these shift our understanding of inside/outside?