Virtual Gaze: Annabelle McEwen 2025

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Virtual Gaze interrogates corporate surveillance of the body. The body expresses and performs a visual language which is observed, hijacked and interpreted by algorithms, making assumptions about us through the monitoring of bodies and faces. Synthesising analogue photography, digital technologies and material output, the project considers how contemporary surveillance technology, classification of the body, data sets and algorithmically curated content impacts user's agency, reality and future.

The portraits perform 'The Cohn-Kanade Dataset's' facial expressions, engaging with the original photographic data set, which informs contemporary Machine-Learning biometric affect recognition. Using my body as a conduit for investigation, I employ expanded methods of photography such as photogrammetry, gaussian splatting and other filtration to capture a virtual gaze of the body.

Three-dimensional output transposes my visual data into a sculptural print is an antithesis to the virtual images we consume via the luminosity of screens. The choice of materials like copper deliberately mimics elements of the infrastructure that homes and facilitates the technology used to surveil, interpret and interrupt our bodies. Virtual Gaze probes the aesthetic potentials of both analogue photography and developing technologies as means to expose, understand and visualise the power structures concealed.