A digital 3D animation by Cliff Crawford. Virtual Eye is an exploration of social media portraiture. Produced in collaboration on Twitter, it explores how the objects with which we surround ourselves create incidental self-portraits.
You can watch the full video on YouTube – remember to turn on the audio to hear the wonderful music by Clive Whitburn.
The work I created for previous exhibitions including `Faceless Portrait` (2017) and `Virtually Me` (2018) belong to a singular stream of ideas culminating in `Virtual Eye` (2019). These ideas became focused on the concept that it is the objects that create a portrait – a metaphorical description of the person. As we share on social media pictures of our lives and the objects that surround us, we create incidental portraits. The intention of this piece is to explore these portraits and move them from the incidental to the intentional.
‘Virtual Eye’ is a collaborative piece. Working with four people via Twitter and using photographs of objects they selected and shared, I curated a portrait of each person based on four themes (home, work, hobbies and interests) producing a total of sixteen portraits. Each of the sets of four portraits was then combined within a virtual glass box in a digital 3D construct; one box per person with their portraits as large transparencies. This presents the portraits as individual pieces which interact with each other exploring the individual portraits and the complexity of their interaction with each other.
As a continuation of the collaboration, each portrait was then reinterpreted as a musical soundtrack which is overlaid in the final video.
`Virtual Eye’ does not simplify; it seeks to communicate the complexity of the individual and their relationships. It seeks to include the viewer in this conversation.
