Produced in 2004 and supported by French arts board Arcadi as part of their experimental multimedia grants, The Eye of the Pilot was a live cinema project based on the private 8mm film archive of French pilot Raymond Lamy. With never publicly seen footage from the early 1950s of Karachi, Ivory Coast, Saigon, Tahiti and San Francisco interwoven with interviews with cameraman pilot, the project captured the ‘romantic innocence’ of the world at a time when traveling with a home movie camera was still highly unusual, especially with colour film. The project gave a rare glimpse into the beginnings of a world that we all now take for granted, where recording of images and international travel are common place.
Performances featured French fretless guitar specialist Alejandro de Valera, who played his rare and custom-built fretless guitars. It was performed internationally over several years, including at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, France, the DIA digital arts awards in Moscow, Russia, in Germany at both the Cologne Museum of Applied Arts and the 2007 European Media Art Festival, in the United States at both the San Francisco International Film Festival and SIGGRAPH ’06 in Boston, on the top terrace of the National Theatre in London for the Watch This Space festival and notably at the Romanian National Museum of Art built in the former dictator Ceausescu’s palace and at the Cork Opera House for the opening of the 50th Cork Film Festival during the cities celebrations as the European Capital of Culture.
