The exhibition installation Optical LIVE examines methods and systems of surveillance as both a technological infrastructure and spatial condition, examining how it fragments, reconstructs, and redefines our understanding of identity and space. Through a series of model instruments and projection installations, the exhibition deconstructs the way surveillance is measured, experienced, and interpreted through the act of observing and being observed. By conjoining the phenomena of contemporary technical surveillance infrastructure with a series of speculative disjunctions, the exhibition situates surveillance not only as a mechanism of image information data but as a spatial and cultural complexion. It invited an architectural rethinking of how surveillance as an integral system, interface, and operable condition can affect how we inhabit, perceive, and design space.
After research and investigation of the intersection between surveillance methods and architecture, the research paper Digital Panopticon and the exhibition Optical LIVE were developed. TITLEOPTICAL LIVE. TIME 2024 - YEAR V PLACE PROJECTBOSTON, MASSACHUSETTSEXHIBITIONOptical LIVE exhibition consists of three core installation instruments; The Lens Multiscope, Focal Array Instrument, and Exquisite Corpse projection. All modeled instruments and visual installations collectively form the foundation of the exploration into the spatial and perceptual dynamics of surveillance technologies and infrastructure. These three elements act as conceptual experiments directly engaging with themes of misidentification, visual abstraction, and spatial fragmentation. Supplementary to the exhibition’s core installations is a series of speculative drawings and process work that extend the research into methods of surveillance. The additional work provides insight into the theoretical and architectural underpinning of the project. These materials contextualize the instruments and installation within a broader framework of architectural thinking, illustrating the iterative development of ideas and the speculative possibilities they generate. Together, the exhibition and its supporting work form a cohesive argument for rethinking surveillance as both a technological mechanism and an architectural condition.
Instrument 01. Lens Multiscope
The Lens Multiscopic Instrument measures and reveals the mechanics of observational technologies and vision through models. The instrument investigates how through a series of different lenses surveillance is distorted, blurred, obscured, fragmented, clarified, colorized, scratched, skewed, framed, reflected, refracted, and formulated. It highlights how surveillance infrastructure and technologies are subject to inherent alter its captured image and involved subject, emphasizing specific features while obscuring others. The manipulation of lenses parallels the basis and errors present in contemporary surveillance architecture while embracing the ideology that vision and observation is fundamentally analogous to natural vision.
Instrument 02. Focal Array Instrument
The Focal Array Instrument visualizes how surveillance technologies map and array a series of focal viewpoints. The device as an object of operable mirrors reflects and refracts visual data pertaining to its inhabited space, revealing the logic of observation. The Focal Array Instrument questions the interaction and design of both the device and the space around it, attempting to investigate how architecture may influence its input and output. By challenging the spatial configuration, the instrument becomes strangely all-seeing in its related context, however consequently reveals dead zones within the tectonic array.
Instrument 03. Exquisite Corpse
The Exquisite Corpse Installation was influenced by the surrealist drawing practice, critiques, and abstracts of false biometric facial recognition identification often found within the mechanics of contemporary surveillance architecture. In the traditional Exquisite Corpse drawing exercise, a fragment combination of head, torso, arms, and legs are morphed to create representations of Frankenstein characters. These drawings disjointed yet cohesive playfully explore unexpected juxtapositions and narratives through the process of building an identification. Within the projection installation, the methodology is subverted to critique the flaws and biases of biometric surveillance systems. By fixating the head from one surveillance stream to the body of another, the projection replicates the fragmentation of data imagery collection, creating combinations of identifications. The work highlights a potential for misinformed technologies as facial recognition and biometric surveillance have been proven to fail, illustrating technologies’ misidentification, misinterpretation, or dehumanizing qualities. The disjointed images of surveillance footage illustrate how subjects are reduced to datasets, released of identity and context. Similar to how the Exquisite Corpses disrupts the drawing’s expectations of a coherent figure with cohesive form, this installation reveals the fragility of our contemporary surveillance infrastructure. Exposed and illustrated as a patchwork projection of grainy, blurred, and in-motion errors. The installation challenges its observers and observed to consider what is gained and lost in the fractal gaze of surveillance architecture. By reclaiming the language of the exquisite corpse, this exhibition turns a tool of artistic play into a medium of critical reflection.
