Interactive media installation
"OKO"
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The Eye of the City
You look at the city. The city looks back at you.
A city has millions of eyes — and no gaze of its own. OKO gives the city back its ability to see: to notice, to respond, to recognise, and to remember. The monumental eye rising above the main square is not a monument people come to look at. It is the first city-scale artwork that looks back.
The form of OKO is refined to the purity of a sign. The eye’s contour — almost nineteen metres wide and as tall as a three-storey house — is shaped from mirror-polished stainless steel and has no colour of its own: it is woven from reflections — the morning sky, the crowns of trees, glass facades, the faces of passers-by. The installation never repeats itself: minute by minute it changes with the city reflected in it. At its centre, between the steel eyelids, lives the iris — a volumetric digital eye formed by two convex round LED screens five metres in diameter, one on each side. OKO has no back of the head: it looks both ways across the square at once, and whichever side you approach from, you will meet its gaze. The eye breathes: the pupil slowly widens and narrows, fibres of light run across the iris, glints flare in its depths. By day OKO watches in a calm deep blue; as darkness falls, its gaze opens into the full spectrum — from emerald to a many-coloured radiance.
OKO does not wait for its audience — it seeks it out. At the foot of the installation, along an arc echoing the lash line, ten glass “pupils” — glowing interactive buttons — are set into the paving. Noticing a person, OKO invites them: the nearest button flashes with a soft pulse, and the giant’s gaze inclines toward them for a moment. Accept the invitation and step into the circle of light — and a pupil the height of a house will smoothly turn and come to rest on you. This sensation cannot be rehearsed and cannot be forgotten: direct eye contact with a work of art. You are no longer a viewer — you have been seen.
But OKO’s greatest mystery unfolds through a gesture everyone knows — the phone. Photograph your eye and send the picture to the installation. Within seconds your own iris unfurls across the screen — unrepeatable as a fingerprint, magnified thousands of times, marked with a personal number so there can be no doubt: this is you. For a few moments the whole city looks at the world through your eyes — and you will forever remember the day you were not a passer-by but the gaze of the city. There are no surveillance cameras and no facial recognition here: people give the city their gaze willingly, and with joy. Instead of Big Brother — big trust.
OKO reveals itself fully when people act together. Occupied buttons make the eye shift its attention from person to person, weaving threads of light and sound between them. When all ten are taken, the culmination begins: the buttons’ pulses gradually converge into a single rhythm, the pupil returns to the centre and opens wide, the iris changes colour and pattern — and may weave itself from fragments of the participants’ own irises. Spatial sound gathers separate voices into one musical theme. The composition lives exactly as long as people stay together. One person changes the direction of the gaze. Together, people change the gaze itself.
Late in the evening, OKO remembers. Slowly, as one leafs through an album, it turns over the gazes of the passing day — blue, green, brown — and the square becomes a gallery of human eyes. Day after day the installation keeps a visual chronicle: thousands of gazes through which the city has looked.
OKO is a universal image that needs no translation: an eye reads the same in every culture, and the name itself is a palindrome, written identically in Cyrillic and Latin script. The installation is designed as a contender for the title of the world’s largest sculpture of a human eye according to Guinness World Records — and as a new landmark capable of becoming the symbol of its city: a meeting place, a pilgrimage site for photographers, and a space where every citizen, at least once in their life, will meet their city’s eyes.
Thousands of eyes. One OKO.
Technical data
Dimensions: overall width of the installation — about 18.9 m; overall height — about 9.7 m.
Media core: two convex round LED screens, 5 m in diameter — one on each side; the iris and the moving pupil are rendered in real time.
Interaction: ten floor buttons Ø 500 mm with presence sensors and internal LED lighting; a wireless channel for receiving eye photos from smartphones; a spatial sound system.
Materials: the eye contour and the visible part of the base are clad in polished stainless steel AISI 304.
Operation: outdoor, all-season — the installation is designed for year-round operation in the open air.
