The All-Seeing Eye

The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version) was an installation by Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry at the BFI Southbank Gallery that I saw late last year. Basically, a projector hanging from the ceiling continually rotated through 360 degrees in a rectangular room with white walls. The projection was of four walls of a room, each projected onto a wall of the space, giving the impression that you're in the room, so i guess they set the space up so the wall sizes were in proportion to those in the footage. There were cushions in the middle to sit on, and you had to keep spinning round to follow the film around the room. As it progresses you gradually start to notice things going missing from the room, a chair, some books and so on until eventually whole kitchen units are going missing. It's almost imperceptible to start with, leaving you feeling unsure if something really was there in the first place. The whole set up is pretty hard to explain in a few lines of text. The 'special effects' are actually being done in real time, the room is actually a scale model, and as the camera they're filming with is rotating they lift out various parts of the furniture until its just a blank room. There's a TV in the room with a section from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (directed by Gondry) where Jim Carrey is finding out about having memories removed playing throughout the whole film, tying in with the pieces dissapearing out of the room. All in all it was an extremely interesting and enjoyable experience, you have a level of involvement as you have to keep following the film around the room instead of sitting passively watching a screen. I love the fact that the objects dissapearing from the room isn't a post production effect. Well worth seeing if it's ever on somewhere again.