The World is Watching

I was commissioned by Privacy Salon to create an artwork for the 18th International CPDP ("Computers, Privacy and Data Protection") Conference in Brussels, Belgium, on the theme 'The World is Watching'.

I first encountered this phrase through the Occupy Movement, when it denoted the then novel sousveillance technique of live-streaming acts of resistance and state brutality to the internet. It has since expanded to cover the broader digital panopticon we all live in today. This includes everything from acts of citizen journalism and witnessing, to 24/7 atrocity news broadcasts, and global surveillance technologies. My feelings about the value of such 'watching', once an idea of empowerment, have become correspondingly ambivalent.

At the same time, this ambivalence has led me to consider the role of watching, of witnessing, and agency, across the more-than-human universe; and the fact that that while watching, we are also being watched by machinic and non-human eyes alike, with corresponding, entangled differences of agency, responsibility, and judgement. We inhabit a shared sensory world, and it is to this shared world we ultimately owe justice and responsibility.

The final artwork consists of drawings of a hundred sensory apparatuses: the eyes of humans, felines, birds, canids, equids, cetaceans, ungulates, and so many more, as well as the oculi of insects, jellyfish, and crustaceans, the light-sensing cells of plants and bacteria, and the scanners of smartphones, drones, satellites, and information-processing systems.

For the conference, this artwork was reproduced across tote bags, posters, programmes, newspapers, podia, and other ephemera.