The Roaming Eyeball

Stainless Steel
2002, Diameter: 100"

The Roaming Eyeball is a large steel sphere with a digital video camera mounted internally. The Eyeball is rolled around the streets while the video camera documents its path. As it rolls, the camera records a sequence of asphalt, streetscape and sky, and in this cycle of imagery a pattern of the panoramic emerges.

The projection merges the terrestrial and the celestial and exposes the absurdity of having a part of the body freed from its whole. The video is re-edited each time the Eyeball is rolled through a new place. I am interested in seeing what an "eye" can see when it is dislocated from a body. Instead of a sensory organ tracking objects from an eye socket, it is released from the constraints of the head. It becomes an object whose vision is dependent on the surface it is rolling over. Unexpected on-lookers may encounter a brief spectacle: the steel ball and its crew appearing before them only to disappear from view within a few blinks of their own eyes.