Filmmaker's wired vision

Filmmaker Rob Spence is in Australia to demonstrate his wireless camera that has replaced his eye.

WHEN Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence was told he would lose his badly damaged eye, he remembered the Six Million Dollar Man and chased a strange and beautiful dream.

He would have a prosthetic eye built to replace it, he decided, but the new eye would be a wireless camera and be used to make films.

"I don't know anyone who has lost an eye and hasn't considered getting a camera put in," he says.

"It's kind of a natural progression."

Not so natural, it would appear, since the 38-year-old has become the first person in the world to actually follow through with the outlandish idea.

Arriving in Melbourne to premiere his footage shot from the eye-camera for the Other Film Festival this week, Mr Spence says the quality is about as good as a mobile phone.

The difference is it's all shot from his direct point-of-view, moves in the same direction he's looking and even shows when he's blinking.

"As a documentary filmmaker what you really want is to create a real, genuine conversation and having a camera eye gives you the opportunity to do that," he tells AAP.

"I don't have to tell somebody I'm filming them, but I could tell them after. So in the end you have this incredibly real conversation instead of being distracted by a lighting guy and a sound guy and a cameraman in the room."

Known online as Eyeborg, Mr Spence damaged his eye as a child while trying to shoot a pile of manure with a gun. He became legally blind.

He was able to keep his eye until five years ago - after he had made his break-out documentary Let's All Hate Toronto, which mocks a Canadian obsession to hate the city for thinking it's the centre of the universe.

After the project Mr Spence called Melbourne scientists working on the bionic eye project and they put him in touch with a team of engineers at other centres.

The eventual prototype fitted a tiny video camera, battery, circuit board and wireless transmitter all into a plastic eye.

Six generations later and his device was recognised as Time magazine's 50 best inventions of 2009.

But for Mr Spence it's more than a unique filmmaking tool and new perspective that's been created: it's a sign of things to come.

"We're on the dawn of the post-human age," he says.

"We're changing profoundly. It started with us wearing clothes... and then it went to glasses and pacemakers and iPhones.

"It's moving faster and faster and all this technology is moving closer and closer to our bodies."

Within a surveillance society constantly connected to the internet, he imagines child amputees soon being given real web shooting, Spider-Man arms or women equipped with machine-gun legs a la Grindhouse by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.

"And why not?" he asks.

His vision of the future may be limited by losing an eye, but it's still visionary, or, as he likes to call it, provocative.

"I am reducing this to a bit to a gimmick, I suppose. But I don't take myself too seriously," he adds.

"And the thing is you don't have to fantasise about this stuff anymore. We can just do it."

His eye-camera film footage will premiere at the Melbourne Museum on Thursday at 6pm (AEST).