a thousand unblinking eyes
oil on canvas, projected video
just as how the 19th-century development of rail travel led to Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s “panoramic gaze”, the rapid accumulation of petabyte-scale satellite imagery brings us towards an awareness of the “planetary gaze”. the painting employs found images from various anime and films—Serial Experiments Lain (1998), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), Perfect Blue (1997), and Let the Right One In (2008)—stacked and layered in the manner one might view images on a computer screen. at bottom left, a CCTV timestamp suggests the gaze of a surveillance camera. the projected video, partially overlapping the canvas, introduces yet another screen, with clips drawn from Surrealist cinema and satellite imagery. the imagery featured deal with ideas of the human body as apparatus; doubles and doppelgangers; cybernetics and systems; eyes, cameras, and their wary gaze.
