Through the Eye of the Cyclops

Description:

David Tomas’s text-based video installation Through the Eye of the Cyclops presented a speculative, alternative history of photography by merging literary fiction with key figures from photographic history. Drawing on the encounter between Odysseus and the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey, the work reimagines a confrontation between William Henry Fox Talbot—known for his early scientific photographs—and Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose Man with the Movie Camera (1929) championed the mechanized eye and montage. In Tomas’s narrative, Vertov blinds Talbot, symbolically rejecting the linear, scientific tradition Talbot represents and proposing instead a fragmented, comparative way of seeing rooted in Vertov’s cinematic techniques. 

Excerpts of The Odyssey, Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (the first photographically illustrated book), and Vertov’s notebooks were printed in letrasign on the gallery walls. The installation also included a CCTV camera and black-and-white monitor, a laser, a smoke machine, and yellow fluorescent lighting fixtures and tubes. 

 Presented as part of Luminous Sites.

Curated by Daina Augaitis and Karen Henry.

Video documentation is available upon request.