Looking at the Sun

Looking at the Sun is an experimental film that translates the rare experience of a total solar eclipse onto the retina in a dialogue between light, perception, and memory. The work explores a paradoxical relationship to the sun: a life-creating source of energy that, on visual inspection, irrevocably damages our optic nerves. It turns By emerging directly on the audience's retina, the process of seeing itself into material. It discusses how light literally burns itself into our visual memory and how perception oscillates between external signals and internal constructs. In this controlled re-enactment of the dangerous gaze into the sun, the installation becomes a discourse on the limits and possibilities of human perception and the earthly economy of light. Looking at the Sun takes form as a custom-made apparatus set in a darkened room: a transparent display, behind which a studio flash is mounted, acts as a retinal drawing machine. The audience experiences a film that follows an intimate journey of a solar eclipse—the memory of dry grass, the slow disappearance of light, and the dangerous moment of looking directly into the sun. Every once in a while, a flash of light breaks through the darkness and projects ephemeral drawings directly onto the viewer's retina. The resulting afterimages are superimposed on the dark space like a collage, creating physically burned-in images that exist only in the eye of the beholder. Preview on request.