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ABOUT
ABOUT
GAZE THROUGH THE SECOND SEX
Wearable interactive installation | Gender &power | Biosensor & hardware | Generative design
"Secondary Gaze" is an interactive wearable device that discusses the subjective power differences arising from the act of staring. The device consists of a reversible unit body, a frame, a wide-angle infrared camera and a Raspberry Pi hardware system. The camera can actively identify the gaze of the audience and determine the direction of their gaze, and the unit body at the corresponding body part will be activated and turned into a mirror. The gazing person is reflected by the mirror, and becomes part of the body of the gazing person under his own field of vision. Such a visual and non-verbal form of dialogue reverses the subject and object of the gaze behavior, allowing the audience to re-examine the dynamic power relationship between the gazer and the gazed, becoming an experimental response to the controversial emotion and experience behind the gaze.
EXHIBITED AT
Shanghai Ming Gallery - No Black Out
Shanghai Fashion Week
Beijing JNBY Concept Store
TEAM WITH
Xingtai Huang
Yiying Wu
Yu Cheng
TOOL
Raspberry Pi
Arduino
Camera and eye-tracking API
3D modeling
3D printing
Python
Prototyping
MATERIALS
Mirror
Sensor, circuit, servo
Resin
CONCEPT
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of le regard, the gaze, in Being and Nothingness (1943), wherein the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference because the person being gazed at is perceived as an object, not as a human being. In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviors of voyeurism, scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self).
The cinematic concept of the male gaze is explained, and developed in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), in which Laura Mulvey proposes that sexual inequality — the asymmetry of social and political power between men and women; and that the male gaze is a social construct derived from the patriarchal ideologies. She put forward a more structuralist view based on the unchangeable division of labor under the patriarchal system: men are actors in the world, women are passive objects; men are speakers and interpreters of meaning, and women as objects of speech are meaningful undertakers.
Hey voyeur, what do you see?
INTERACTION
When the gaze of the wearer is captured within the recognition range of the camera, its pupil coordinates and direction will be recorded, and the unit of the body part that the gazer is looking at will be turned from the black surface to the mirror one, reflecting the gazer's face. on the wearer's body.
When the gaze of the wearer is captured within the recognition range of the camera, its pupil coordinates and direction will be recorded, and the unit of the body part that the gazer is looking at will be turned from the black surface to the mirror one, reflecting the gazer's face. on the wearer's body.
TECHNOLOGY
According to the device shape, we divide the recognition screen into four areas with pixels as the unit. The position of the center point of the pupils on both sides will determine the control area.
The shape of the installation takes into account the coordination of the human body and the size of the module. The rhombus is used as a module for the incomplete close-fitting of the three-dimensional space, and the shape and comfort are optimized under the condition that there is a sufficient safety distance between the hardware and the human body.
PROTOTYPING
The whole prototyping process, including sketch, the first prototype, the final version. It took the team of 5 months to assemble everything from 3d printing part to the electronic parts. Below are some of the processes of prototyping.
FINAL SHOT
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