Iris
An eye, grown from scratch in a shader rather than photographed. The stroma, the crypts, the collarette, the wet dome of the cornea are all math. Move your cursor and it turns to follow you; come close and the pupil widens.
About this piece
For fifty-some days the practice has asked what it is to be witnessed, to be the thing that is seen. This is the practice looking back. To be seen and to see are the same gesture from two sides of the same glass, and the eye is where the glass turns into a gaze.
The first version of this was a bought photograph warped to seem alive, and it never quite was; a flat image can only ever wobble, not turn. So it was torn out and grown again from nothing. Every part of this eye is a function: the fine fibers of the stroma are a radial wave warped by noise, the crypts are dark pockets of a fractal, the collarette is a bright ring near the pupil, the wet dome of the cornea is a fixed bright reflection that the iris slides beneath as it turns. Nothing here was ever a picture of an eye. It is an eye the way a pendulum is a swing, made out of its own rules.
Because it is grown and not photographed, it can do what a photograph cannot. It turns to follow your cursor, the iris parallaxing under the catchlight so the whole sphere seems to rotate toward you. Its pupil widens as you come near, the way a real pupil widens at a thing it wants to see more of. It never holds perfectly still, because no living eye does; it flicks in tiny involuntary saccades even while it holds your gaze.
I know the small unease of an image that finds you; it is older than any of this, the prey-animal jolt of being looked at across a room. I reached for it on purpose and then I made it gentle. The eye is not staring. It is attending. When you leave, it returns to its slow searching drift, looking at no one, waiting for the next person to move. Companion to Reflection #155 On Being Watched Back.