eye work
Bernd Oppl
11.03.2025 – 28.03.2025
Solo exhibition at
bb15 – Space for Contemporary Art, Linz.
Prologue:
Cover one eye with your flat hand.
Now, how do you perceive the world? Your vision field has halved. Has it become difficult to accurately estimate the distance of objects? Are you surprised that this page appears closer than expected? Does the page seem even larger?
Stereoscopic perception – the foundation on which our epistemological privilege of sight rests – is temporarily suspended. If this condition were to persist, your brain would adapt to monocular, single-eyed perception. After 6–12 months, a physiological reorganization of the visual cortex would even occur. Before that happens, you could compensate for depth perception in everyday life through the relative movement of objects, their overlapping, shadows, and blurriness as an “illusory,” psychological representation of space. The semblance of distance and perspective would allow you to make only a few sensorimotor mistakes. However, you’d probably notice over time to which extent your surroundings are actually involved in your orientation. You might even become aware of how your surroundings construct your sense of place. In this situation, technical aids would prove themselves less as prostheses of your body, but rather as additional funnels of the outside world, through which perception is constantly generated in strange kinds of feedback and loops.
eye work
11.03.2025 – 28.03.2025
Our perception arises from the spectrum of our senses and apparatuses, our organic and their mechanical capacity for abstraction. Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist, mathematician, and AI pioneer, situates consciousness in feedback, fleeting ‘Strange Loops’ that bridge the inner and outer world. In the age of a continued computational turn, our neural pathways merge with circuits, microchips, and displays, transforming perception into a technically augmented sensorium. Paradoxical flows between subject, object, and mediating entities (technē) shape our epistemic frameworks, rendering the contemporary self a product of its involvement with the environment and diverse media – ever susceptible to cognitive modulation and emotional calibration.
In his exhibition “eye work,” Bernd Oppl addresses these invisible strange loops that moderate and modulate the morphology of data and their presentations. Thereby, projecting an inside recursively towards the out and manifesting in model-like interiors that seem imbued with independence and will.
Strange Loops (2024) – from a series of four video objects – portrays the autonomous presence of typically overlooked things. As testimonies of abandoned movements, extracted from their original context, they transform into conduits for subcutaneous sensation, intuition, and memory. They embody the concatenation of psychophysical levels of abstraction, which evolve through technological transformation of our senses into even ‘stranger loops.’
The video piece Water is my eye (2024) consistently performs this outward-directed self-referentiality of consciousness: The screen unfolds the eye socket as an empty, sun-flooded peep-box, while the tear water breaks in through the door. Supported by an uncanny synthetic soundscape and slow-motion imagery, the drops, however, only run from the opposite window. The eye itself remains in its interplay of projections – between the static frame, the luminous window, and the screen, from which the flashing of pixels, mediated through our retina, emerge as form.
Electric currents flicker in resonance with our neural impulses while effectively activating coloured fluorescent tubes in the immersive sound installation phantom Power (2024). The recorded magnetic tape loops generate audiovisual patterns that mirror our attraction and alignment to the RGB spectrum of digital interfaces. Thus, Bernd Oppls gallery exhibition makes tangible those ephemeral strange loops which, according to Hofstadter, act as “shy creatures, and they tend to avoid the light of day”. He presents to us those moments in which the very architecture and technological determinacy of perception unveils.
Text: Lona Gaikis, March 2025.
Bernd Oppl, Austrian media artist. Recipient of the Professor Hilde Goldschmidt Prize for the promotion of young Austrian artists, and artists living in Austria in 2024. Future fellow of the ISCP International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York, 2026.