Barbara Hammer used filmic techniques associated with the baring of the apparatus towards materializing an embodied empathy. Hammer had to place her grandmother Anna – losing her sight and with a deteriorating illness – in a nursing home. Optic Nerve’s images, manipulated by optical step printing, repetition, and re-photography, dilate, arrest, and filter the moments Hammer spent with her grandmother in the rooms and halls of the care home, suffused by the tensions of memory and opacity, re-collection and disintegration. Making palpable their intersubjective bond, Hammer layers perceptual, corporeal, and psychic strata, conjuring her grandmother’s sensate experience and fading sight through a prismatic materiality.