Like the picture of the old woman who turns into a young lady depending on your focus, my works play with the expectations and preconceptions of the viewer by mixing genres, points of reference and conceptual models. Technically, this often entails capturing an everyday situation on video and transforming it to the point of being barely recognizable. The transformation itself and how this is achieved plays an important part in my work process. E.g. it can be done through a process of physical or digital distortion or omission, or by cut ‘n pasting the imagery onto itself until it gains a new meaning. The important thing is that the viewer is constantly forced to switch between thinking he knows what he sees and being confused and unable to comprehend the imagery.

In recent works I have started looking into the way our vision works, and used this as a starting point for transforming imagery. For instance, in the video installation Peripheral Panorama, I walked through The Hague with two cameras filming not straight forward, but to the sides at an angle corresponding with my peripheral vision. This footage was filtered to eliminate detail and enhance contrast and movement. It was synchronized and projected onto two screens at the same angle as it was recorded, in effect giving a walk-through of The Hague as my peripheral vision would have ‘seen’ it.

Saccadic Sightings deals, in a somewhat similar way, with the saccadic movements of the eyes. I want to incorporate these movements into video footage to try to create a representation of the input the eye receives from its surroundings – capture the ‘raw’ footage as it were, before the input is processed.

In relation to my previous works, the movements will act as the transformation. By their very nature the movements should seem recognizable to the viewer, but the fragmented imagery of the ‘unprocessed’ footage will be confusing and very difficult to fully comprehend – strange, yet familiar. I plan to construct a similarly fragmented narrative around the footage, creating a dream-like, association-driven video(-installation).

Rune Peitersen