Artist Statement
Eyes. Eyes watching from everywhere. Inescapable. Not when you hide away, not when you do well, not even when you sleep. This is what anxiety feels like--a constant force that you feel everywhere even if it defies logic.
My anxiety spiked my senior year of high school, when expectations seemed impossibly high--I had to be perfect. The smallest mistake would trigger overwhelming pressure, I felt the atmosphere dense around me, paralyzing my thoughts as I replayed moments of failure endlessly in my head. This strange feeling of the world being distorted is what is what connected me to the potential of augmented reality as a medium.
The eyes in this installation are intentionally unsettling, programmed to follow the user as they explore the augmented environment. I designed this piece for the user to stand in front of the mountain of Les Yeux du Monde gallery, which fittingly translates to “The Eyes of the World.” This scene would have the digital eyes and physical mountains converging to one beautiful but distant picture representing the pressure I felt in high school to craft a perfect future. However, this installation adapts to any scenery, allowing the user to project their own feelings of anxiety onto whatever landscape frames their experience.
Development
My first priority was developing a strong concept for this installation, naturally I started brainstorming by exploring my own most powerful emotional experiences. Anxiety emerged as the clear focus since it was not only powerful, but also universal. To visualize anxiety as an experience, I wanted to create something nerve-racking that only gets worse the longer you look. What else better for that then an unsettling number of eyes that watch you? Here is the first concept art I came up with:
Once I committed to using eyes as my motif, I had to figure out how to make them an object in unity. Lacking in 3D modeling skills and wanting to maintain the personal authenticity of the project, I chose to create 2D assets from my own artwork rather than using free assets from the internet. I experimented with a couple of techniques like watercolor to illustrate the eyes, but ultimately discovered an old set of eyes studies from my senior year of high school, precisely when my anxiety was most intense. The graphite pencil drawings carried an emotional weight that felt perfect for this project.
Watercolor practice:
Final Decision:
After selecting the drawings, I scanned them at 600 PPI and then I imported the image into photoshop. I removed the background by keying out the white paper, leaving just the pencil marks and cropped each eye into their own file. With the assets done, I created a unity project meant to port onto an iPhone and set up the Vuforia engine and AR functionality.
The next technical step was making the eyes track the viewer. After some research I found a technique called “billboarding,” where a sprite will always face the main camera. I implemented this functionality by importing my PNG files and converting them into sprites in Unity and attached a billboard script to each one. With the technical base done I placed the eyes in various ways, centering around a main pair of eyes, and cumulating upwards so when the user looks up they discover an increasing number of eyes
Eyes in Unity:
The resulting experiences creates a visceral manifestation of anxiety, a sensation of being perpetually observed, judged, and evaluated from every angle, with no possibility of escape.
