Optical Flow

This multimedia installation assembles a selection of moving images and videos created by the artist over the last few years. It is a manifestation of Pekala’s research, which proposes the term auto-gaze as the online counterpart to self-gaze—the concept of perceiving oneself through others' gaze. On social media, the audience whose gaze we view ourselves from is indistinct, which creates a dynamic of mutual surveillance among users. Auto-gaze is additionally conditioned by the layer of distortion that personalized algorithms create by dictating the criteria making content visible in the first place. In Optical Flow, the fictive narratives of her universe converge and play out simultaneously like a string of For Your Page content on a social media feed. By residing on top of the tower and watching the visitors’ reactions to her work, she takes on the role of both the performer and observer, mirroring the dynamic of mutual surveillance. In contrast to this, the videos are embedded inside a 3-meter hexagon-shaped tower—a pervasive structure symbolizing the power inequalities governing digital systems that turn social media into an instrument of surveillance.