The Optimising Gaze and its Demons

A myriad of computational eyes covers the planet. They sense and record, feeding calculation machines that manage, extract, predict, preempt, and destroy, often in opaque and confusing ways. Evoking both personal histories and ideological projects across different times and geographies, five artists expose a vast (and often contested) apparatus of vision that doesn’t only look but subtly inhabits organic, social, geological and infrastructural bodies. A gaze that refracts itself as a ghost of imperial power and twisted dreams of control.

Lecture performance
The View from Above Takes My Breath Away – Fully
Nadim Choufi

Project presentation
Particular Waters
Su Yu Hsin

Project presentation
A Moonless Night
Solveig Qu Suess

Lecture performance
Infrastructural Horror: Soaring, Sprawling, Vast.
Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich

All photos: Miha Fras / Aksioma