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Opto-Isolator

2007 | Golan Levin with Greg Baltus / Standard Robot Company

Opto-Isolator (2007: Golan Levin with Greg Baltus) inverts the condition of spectatorship by exploring the questions: "What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond to us?" The sculpture presents a solitary mechatronic blinking eye, at human scale, which responds to the gaze of visitors with a variety of psychosocial eye-contact behaviors that are at once familiar and unnerving. Among other forms of feedback, Opto-Isolator looks its viewer directly in the eye; appears to intently study its viewer's face; looks away coyly if it is stared at for too long; and blinks precisely one second after its visitor blinks.

Acknowledgements
Mechatronic design and fabrication by Greg Baltus of Standard Robot Company, Pittsburgh. Opto-Isolator was developed with support from Creative Capital and the Berkman Faculty Development Fund at Carnegie Mellon University. Additional thanks to Frank Broz, Fran Flaherty and Dave Tolliver for their assistance in realizing this project. Photographs by John Berens; video by David Plakke.

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The following 0'45" YouTube video shows Opto-Isolator installed at Bitforms gallery, NYC, December 2007. (This video is also available as a high-quality download at the bottom of this page.)

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Additional Resources

High-resolution photographs of Opto-Isolator can be found in this Flickr photoset.

Images (click to enlarge)

Video