The Look of Love

An interactive installation that turns the unconscious act of blinking into a mechanism for change.

At first, it’s just a box—until you notice two peepholes inviting you to look inside. Staring through, you find a pair of eyes staring back. Then, you blink. With each blink, the image shifts—currency transforms, zooming into the eyes of a face, while a new version of The Look of Love replaces the last.

Drawing from the late 19th-century Mutoscope, a hand-cranked device that advanced frames of moving images, The Look of Love replaces mechanical control with an involuntary human action. Instead of turning a crank, you cut through video with the simple, unconscious act of blinking.

This piece explores perception, agency, and the instability of meaning, where even the smallest biological reflex can trigger a shift in both image and sound. The work continues to inform my broader practice—particularly my interest in how seemingly automatic human actions influence interactive and visual systems.