The Mime

An interactive portrait that follows you with its eyes — and photographs you back.

The Mime is an interactive canvas in which a mime artist follows passing visitors with her eyes. An infrared camera and a Kinect sensor detect the people walking by, and a jerky, stop-motion mime animation turns to watch them. It was one of my first works, made for the Amber Art & Technology Festival in 2013.

If a visitor tries to photograph the canvas, the Mime answers in kind: she takes the visitor's picture and displays it beside herself for everyone else to see. While the visitor carries the Mime's image away as a souvenir, a consumable object, the Mime pulls the visitor's image into her own world, imprisons it inside the frame and makes it part of the work.