In 1959, the classic experiments conducted by Lettvin and his colleagues suggested that the frog’s brain does not receive the “raw image” produced by the visual system, but meaning-laden codes already processed by the eye. The work brings this split between image and interpretation into a game-engine environment: a weapons system becomes a camera system, gun handling becomes camera handling, and firing becomes a way of producing images. Seeing is staged as a procedural action rather than a passive reception of the world.
Process notes
The film looks like a practical lesson and then, a moment in, steps sideways: it moves “3D shooting” away from stereoscopic imaging and proposes instead to shoot inside a simulated three-dimensional world, replacing the camera with an FPS weapons system. I follow the double sense of shoot — to film and to fire — through the body the camera and the gun share: the hand-cranked camera and the hand-cranked machine gun, the cameraman and the avatar. In the game engine the physics is the condition of the image itself; surface, edge, collision and feedback put the camera and whoever holds it inside the world they are recording. The image arrives as the output of an action system, where code, body, rule, engine and physical collapse keep cutting into one another.
Exhibitions
- 2026, Instance Dungeons and Sights / 無限副本與瞄準器, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (CNTW) — March 28 - June 28, 2026
Links / references
- National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts: Instance Dungeons and Sights / 無限副本與瞄準器 Official event listing for the NTMoFA exhibition.
- NTMoFA news: 從遊戲副本到影像戰場 National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts press release for the exhibition.
- GPI government publication: 無限副本與瞄準器 Government publication record for the exhibition catalogue.
- Liberty Times Art: 在「瞄準器」裡重新學會觀看 Exhibition feature with an NTMoFA installation photograph of the work.