Eagle Eye

2026, single channel  video projection, colour, silent, 7 hours 31 minutes
Eagle Eye has a duration of several continuous hours, observing an immobilised but awake bald eagle positioned on a surgical theatre and observed from various points of view.

The film is made from found footage of rescue raptors, stills, and filmed footage, later re-skinned as a sick North American bald eagle through a lengthy, procedural, and highly precise animation process, combining CGI and generative AI.

The eagle typically has one of the sharpest focal apparatuses found in nature, a unique double eyelid keeps the eye open and moist while maintaining eyesight. Indeed, “eagle-eye” conveys a sense of constant scrutiny of its surroundings including the visitor in front of the screen, all while being incapacitated in terms of bodily movement or action.

Slaughtered as intensely as the bison during the 19th century, the American bald eagle narrowly made it through to today, accepting the company of humans who put nest cams up for online excitement, as eagles try to rebuild their nests and families. Our patient used to be an icon of strength and courage, a sacred messenger between earthly and spiritual realms. Here the bird is reduced to an immobilised body while still maintaining the razor sharp observation of a “tech-boss”. Its artificial awareness resembles that of a patient with locked-in syndrome - the archetypal disembodiment disorder - while it continues to possess a pair of relentlessly observing eyes.

The eagle, its eye and its behaviour have been developed starting from a slightly more nervous, heavily breathing animal, while training the model to become calmer, more serene , with hardly any movement at all. By embedding this process in the work, the gradual transformation of both model and animal becomes subtly perceptible over the course of many hours, suggesting a strange link between an artificial, computational realm and organic life.