Look, the Sun Is Burning
“Look, the Sun is Burning is an experimental film and visual essay that explores how theories of vision have evolved from antiquity to the digital age. Inspired by a 1687 illustration by Johannes Zahn—depicting a dragon pursued by hunters and intersected by rays of sight—the project revisits ancient ideas of vision as a physical act, in which the gaze was conceived as an extension of the soul. Drawing on historical notions such as Homeric “gestures of seeing,” the film connects these early understandings to contemporary forms of perception shaped by glowing screens, touch interfaces, and eye-tracking technologies. Through constructed filmic devices, sunlight experiments, and digital gaze-analysis tools, the work investigates how looking has become measurable, traceable, and even instrumentalized in fields ranging from neuroscience to marketing and social-media algorithms. The recurring image of sunlight concentrated through a lens serves as a material and conceptual counterpart to modern visual data—like heatmaps generated by patterns of attention—creating analogies between physical light and the digital “heat” produced by our gaze. Ultimately, Look, the Sun is Burning portrays a person watching images of seeing itself, merging digital and analogue, real and virtual realms to reflect on how our ways of looking continue to shape the world we perceive.
[based upon a text by Gregor Eldarb, 2025]www.gregoreldarb.com
