The installation Handsight is an interactive computer graphic
environment created in 1990. The work creates a correlation
of the physical world and the virtual world. A bottle that
consists of its own closed world, which embodies the mountain
Golgotha with the cross, represents the physical world.
The virtual world is a computer-generated environment, which
is projected on a wall in a dark room and only works by
interaction from the viewer through a transparent bowl.
The bowl is positioned in the middle of the room. Next to
the bowl lays a hand-held eyeball interface. Once the visitor
penetrates his hand inside the empty transparent globe with
the hand-held "eye," the projected eye on screen opens into
a virtual world. As a metaphor for the eye now the transparent
bowl with the hand-held eye functions as an eye itself.
By moving the hand-held eye the viewer can now explore the
virtual environment.
The bottle was chosen for its value as an ethnological object that evokes belief by giving it a visual representation. It’s a passion jar used in late nineteenth century to foster imagery access to a sacred scene. The world of the bottle and the virtual world visualized on the screen offer a metaphor for perception. It is a perception of a virtual realm that is not matched to the physical world, but rather is a view of the "mind"s-eye" or of externalized imagination. At the same time, it exposes the logic of this construction rather than participates in the illusion. In this way, the piece both offers and deconstructs interactivity.