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Design

CCTV Chandelier Provides Third-Person Views–Of Yourself

Hwang Kim’s design allows the total experience of seeing yourself.

Many of us often dream in the third-person perspective, witnessing ourselves like drifting, disembodied watchers. Sometimes we even extend our third-person reveries into lucid dreams, where a heightened awareness allows the dreamer to actively engage in the dream environment. Whether our dreams are lucid or not, as regular sleepers, we experience ourselves in the third person on a regular basis. But, what if we were awake? Would it be possible to experience our third-person selves as comprehensively as we do when we’re dreaming? Fascinatingly enough, we’ve discovered some extraordinary possibilities for such metaphysical endeavors.

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Hwang Kim, currently a product designer and student at the Royal College of Art, has created the CCTV Chandelier, a visual system that allows you to see yourself objectively from multiple third-person points of view. With this design, Kim has engineered a way to experience perception that is nearly panoptic. Taking wearable technology to the next dimension, his interactive installation comprises 12 CCTVs attached to a collar, that circle the participant's face. The results are spectacularly eerie and hyper-futuristic, bringing to mind images of dystopian torture tools from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, or contraptions from Burton’s Edward Scissorhands.

This video chandelier is connected to 12 individual TV screens, permitting complete and constant perspectives of the participant and his or her surroundings. As Kim is restructuring the experience of perception into an all-encompassing totality, we can understand that his intentions are deeply rooted in Gestalt psychology. As the basic principle of Gestalt theory claims that the whole is different from the sum of its individual parts, Kim’s apparatus stresses the need to understand conscious experience through the simultaneous consideration of all the physical and mental aspects of an individual.

Watch the short video clip above and directly witness the different perspectives of Kim’s face and his environment all at the same time.