\"I am a cyborg so I should be able to figure this out,\" says filmmaker and self-styled \"eyeborg\" Rob Spence, fiddling with the projector at the PINC 15 conference in the Netherlands. <\/p>\n
There are generally two reactions people have when Spence tells them he has an eye camera, he says. Either they think it's cool, or they think it's creepy. \"I think this is because the eyes are supposed to be the window to the soul, not to YouTube.\" <\/p>\n
When you have your eye out, he says, they put in a ball of sea coral in the socket because blood vessels and muscles grow into the sea coral before they insert a peg. \"I decided to wear an eyepatch -- mostly because women like it better. Why not be totally different rather than trying to be the same?\" <\/p>\n
\"Unfortunately my eye is in the garage right now,\" Spence tells the audience. A common misconception is that people think it is in some way connected to his brain he says, whereas it's actually a standalone unit, that can be taken in and about and cleaned \"a little bit like earrings\". <\/p>\n
When Spence lost his eye by holding a shotgun up to a face \"like they do in the movies\", he was already a filmmaker. At the time he was working on a comedy called Let's All Hate Toronto, but when he got his camera eye, he decided he would use it to go out and film other bionic people. \"I know a bunch of cyborgs -- we call each other.\" <\/p>\n
\"Unlike you humans, I can upgrade my eye,\" he quips. \"It's a place to play when you have a part of your body missing.\" He talks about the link between pop culture and his eye -- when he put a module in it that had a 40 cent LED light in it, the press went wild for it, because it made him look like a science fiction cyborg. \"If you have a pacemaker are you a cyborg? If you have contact lenses are you a cyborg? Not really. If you have a forty-cent LED light? Yes you're a cyborg.\" <\/p>\n
Spence has also looked at creating a mobile eye transmitter, although while the human body can in some ways be a pretty good antenna, this is not always the case, he says, pointing to an RF transmitter. \"If I were to stick this inside a ham, those are the sort of issues I have.\" <\/p>\n
When Spence first got his eye, there was something of a Star Trek element to it, meaning it retained more of a cool factor. But more recently people have increasingly been questioning it and focussing on the creepy factor. \"We have Google Glass now so this is more on people's minds these days,\" he says. He tells the audience that initially the anti-Glass people tried to recruit him to be part of their campaign, but that he felt it would have been a \"little hypocritical\" of him to join in. <\/p>\n
What Spence is interested in now though is the question of whether people are still terrified of Big Brother, as he was when he read George Orwell growing up, or whether they're now more afraid of Little Brother. \"Even in police states, are you more afraid of the big camera, or the person with the little camera?\" <\/p>\n
People are increasingly going to have video and it will eventually become part of our bodies, believes Spence. \"It's going to become all video, all the time.\" As such, for his next project, he's going to take on one man who knows all about the dangers of the small camera -- Mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, who was famously caught in camera smoking crack. Spence plans to stand for mayor himself while reprising his role as Mr Toronto in the film Let's All Hate Toronto 2. <\/p>\n
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The perks of being an 'eyeborg'<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \"I am a cyborg so I should be able to figure this out,\" says filmmaker and self-styled \"eyeborg\" Rob Spence, fiddling with the projector at the PINC 15 conference in the Netherlands. There are generally two reactions people have when Spence tells them he has an eye camera, he says. Either they think it's cool, or they think it's creepy Continue reading