[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDYR3JWxDqo]

For the FaceOSC project, I decided to focus one one gesture in particular: blinking eyes. I was thinking about Walter Murch’s book “In The Blink of an Eye”. Murch was a film editor. He argues that the blink of an eye is a means for our minds to delineate experience, to punctuate our perception. The job of a film editor is, too, to delineate experience, and it’s no surprise that film audiences have been observed to blink in tandem, synchronizing with the editor’s cuts. I thought it would be interesting to force my perception of experience on a viewer by projecting my blink into the space around me. I used FaceOSC, Max/MSP and Arduino to wire the lights in my studio up to turn off each time I blink. The effect is that the entire space goes dark whenever I blink. While this is barely perceptible to me, the viewer gets to experience the same delineations of time that I do. Perhaps blinks are like sneezes – maybe they are contagious.