0.0D (Diopter Zero)
HD experimental 3D animation film
clip from the film teaser0.0D (Diopter Zero) 2026
HD experimental 3D animation film - 04’37
An endless dream unfolding as an iterative sight-test loop, where the gaze is either compelled toward or becomes obsessed with a digitally altered motif: an autorefractor target image. The work explores vision itself, the machinery of seeing, and the mechanisms that structure seeing.
Content-wise, this short film continues the thread from the 2024 project Into the Digital Cartographic Void, extending its concerns with the loop of gaze (seeing and being seen), technological visuality in the digital realm, while reflecting on the ontological origins of contemporary digital aesthetics such as liminal space and dreamcore.
The background for initiating this project was a resurfacing childhood memory, recontextualized by the contemporary popularity of the aforementioned aesthetics: as a child undergoing vision tests from time to time, I experienced and was somehow obsessed with how my way of seeing and my focus were directed by medical/digital technological systems and by the structure of the image (a shared visual memory among the vision-impaired) when looking into the autorefractor. Here, collage-based digital aesthetics, globalized visual products, and the overuse of the eye as a dominant sensory channel shape contemporary modes and the imagination of seeing.
Beyond the conceptual and content dimensions, this project is, at its core, an embodied experiment in the production of visuality. Throughout the making process, I engage in a dialogue with the media and technologies I use, the outcome in black and white and certain aesthetics is not what I could plan ahead in the very beginning, but the result of a constant negotiating between the software’s affordances, limitations, agency and potentiality, and my own choices. This experience marks an adaptation in my personal methodology: from a previously theory- and research-driven approach toward one grounded in material practice and aesthetic exploration. Rather than merely critiquing the generative process or consuming the results of digital imagery, I now inhabit its production, observing closely what unfolds through my own intentional self-“cyborgization” and “informatization.”
This embodied engagement offers a deeper reflection on the intricate interrelationship between artificial visuality, aesthetics in the digital era and the perception of reality. The 3D world is always far more than a mimicry of the real: much like how media once functioned as passive carriers, digital tools have evolved to reveal their own embedded agency. For instance, the evolution of horror cinema, from depicting ghostly blurriness to employing technical glitches as signs of the abnormal, illustrates this shift in visual logic.