Oculus ~ Verso comprises nine photographic images and nine lines of text with a grey cover from which a disc has been cut.

For Oculus ~ Verso, Matthew Tickle built a camera which records the entire circle of light transmitted by the lens. The photographs in this book were made on film and the negatives scanned to produce positive digital images which were then inverted for printing.

The images were made over the course of a year and follow the seasons. Accompanying the images a sequence of phrases form a poem. Tickle states; "The impulse to write was a desire to pair the intensive act of looking with an intuitive act of writing, putting down in words the simplest set of relationships that might encompass a unity of mind, mechanism and experience."

The title Oculus ~ Verso is derived by analogy from the word chromosome, a compound word formed from two Greek words chromo (colour) and soma (body). The pupil of the eye and the aperture within the camera pertain to two definitions of the word oculus, a circular opening, these two definitions are used to frame the body of the poem. The word chromosome was coined by microscopist Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz in 1888 because chromosomes were first identified as cellular structures through staining with coloured dyes. Some of Tickle’s early experiments making images for the project resulted in images suggestive of tissue specimens prepared and stained for the pathologist’s scrutiny. The use of film with its layers of light sensitive pigments and the dyes used in printing the images preserve the literal sense of the word chromosome as a material fact of the book.

Tickle is particularly interested in Goethe's assertion of the ultimate unity of phenomenon and theory in which opposites are complementary and indivisible. Goethe’s scientific method which he named Tender Empiricism (Zarte - Empirie) is a mode of perceiving grounded in the acknowledgement of a creative interaction between mind and the objects of sensory perception.