At Eye Level is an experimental moving-image work that examines how visibility, attention, and anonymity are produced and regulated within urban space. Shot entirely on a Handycam from an embodied viewing position, the project establishes a mediated layer between the viewer and the real-world. The camera operates as a reflective interface that structures distance, proximity, and control. Through this system, the viewer becomes implicated in the act of looking, made aware of their position within a regulated field of visibility.
The film unfolds over a single journey. A rapid sequence of fragmented shots compresses the transition from a private interior into the Berlin underground, using rhythm and motion to collapse time and distance. Once inside the train, the pacing slows and the camera becomes largely static. Bodies across from the lens are framed in close proximity, producing a mode of observation characterised by visual access without interaction. These moments of unnoticed observation produce a temporary sense of visual control sustained by anonymity and the apparent unidirectionality of the gaze.
This apparent stability is disrupted when a passenger returns the gaze, looking directly into the camera. Drawing on John Berger’s observation that acts of looking are conditioned by the possibility of reciprocity, the work formalises this moment as a rupture within the visual system. The returned gaze exposes the fragility of assumed anonymity and reveals the extent to which visual control depends on the absence of reciprocal visibility.
What follows is a sequence of sustained, unbroken stares in night vision. The visual language shifts as faces appear closer, illuminated and invasive. This transition collapses the asymmetry between observer and observed and eliminates the protective distance previously maintained by the interface, transforming visibility into a confrontational condition.
By translating a lived public encounter into a mediated image-space, At Eye Level creates a distance from the immediacy of the situation, allowing patterns of looking, control, and reciprocal visibility to be examined as systemic conditions produced by mediated urban environments.
