“[An object] can also pass from image to image, so that its story is that of a migration, the cycle of the avatars it traverses far from its original being....” - Roland Barthes, The Metaphor of the Eye

The St0ry of the Eye is a focused contemplation exploring the visual motifs that permeate and structure the eponymous novel by Georges Bataille as realized through its multi-media epicenter & relative roaming theater (one inspired by the panic movement, Paul McCarthy…) enacted by ten video, performance & installation artists, as well as the audience. While not a strict adaptation, each of these collective works, videos and performances, are constrained by four pairs of motifs (sets of metaphors that can metonymically morph into each other), the novel’s organizational spine: egg/yolk, testicle/semen, sun/sunlight, eye/vitreous.

Engaging with Bataille’s inside/outside relationship with the Surrealist movement, the various components of the installation will hearken back to the Exquisite Corpse tradition. Despite the lack of concrete connections between these episodic chains, the participant/spectator, as recipient of the multifarious stimuli, will also be invited to partake in this process of poesis. Passing from image to image, object to object, ocularity to liquidity and back again; a narrative/epic/lyrical (literary, literal & everything in between)/large, visually and aurally loud, and subtly lascivious interactive, multi-media experience has been created.