What do you see?-180 degree
Photos in seterioscopes
2021–2022
Photos in seterioscopes
2021–2022
What do you see?-180 degree (2021–2022) starts from photography as a primarily one-directional act of looking, where vision is configured from a human-centric vantage point, and the subject is always already passivized. The project began from my own experience as a visitor at the Field Museum becoming fixated on the taxidermied animals that seemed to look back at me, and having to confront the impossibility of this looking because they have lost the ability to see forever.
The work was first exhibited as an installation of stereoscopes. Each stereoscope houses two photographs, one of the taxidermied animal, the other of the exhibition environment in front of which the animal is placed. The two images, when viewed together through the stereoscope, create a dizzying and in-between viewing experience that both aligns with the perspective of an animal looking out while also rendering that alignment impossible. By emphasizing the collapse of mutual looking in the museum presentation, the installation enacts the subject's visual disempowerment.
This exploration of vision continued in a series of works made with AI. I trained an artificial vision model on my own photographs of taxidermied animals to further displace the act of looking away from a biological subject, onto a computational one. Circulating between museum archive, machine hallucination, and reinterpretation, these images and videos ask how vision is translated, deferred, or disarmed once the viewer is no longer human.
The work was first exhibited as an installation of stereoscopes. Each stereoscope houses two photographs, one of the taxidermied animal, the other of the exhibition environment in front of which the animal is placed. The two images, when viewed together through the stereoscope, create a dizzying and in-between viewing experience that both aligns with the perspective of an animal looking out while also rendering that alignment impossible. By emphasizing the collapse of mutual looking in the museum presentation, the installation enacts the subject's visual disempowerment.
This exploration of vision continued in a series of works made with AI. I trained an artificial vision model on my own photographs of taxidermied animals to further displace the act of looking away from a biological subject, onto a computational one. Circulating between museum archive, machine hallucination, and reinterpretation, these images and videos ask how vision is translated, deferred, or disarmed once the viewer is no longer human.