The Looker, 2015

Interactive Installation

This work tries to address the psychic distance between an artwork and spectator. I seek to minimize the psychic distance and build up a close connection between an artwork and a spectator and observe how psychic distance affects the spectator’s aesthetic experience.

Psychic distance is a kind of immaterial distance between two subjects or objects that cannot be measured and controlled. Edward Bulloughm, an English aesthetician and scholar of modern languages, has stated that psychical distance has a strong effect on aesthetic experience with an artwork in the essay “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle.”

This installation consisted of different eye movement videos projected inside the metal storage locker. When a spectator looks through the hole, sensors would be triggered, and the eye focus (projection) would be changed to the direction of the hole, which creates eye contact with the spectator. The immediate response to the spectator with the eye contact in order to build up a tight connection to the spectator, which decreases the psychic distance between an artwork and spectator. Moreover, it addresses the issue that the spectator in the exhibition area is not the only subject watching the works; they could also be the objects that are being observed.