2026, CCTV camera, LCD screen, polariser filter
Visibility is a trap – Michel Foucault
It is hard to miss the expanding presence of surveillance systems and technologies that are deeply embedded in the fabric of everyday life. At the same time, surveillance has also become more invisible with increasingly complex networks of watching-and-being watched in which power relations are more diffuse.
Smile considers the role of individual and collective agency in socio-technological conditions that are characterised by ubiquitous surveillance. Becoming conscious of the gaze of the other means becoming conscious of oneself and one’s place in the world as an object. The idea of an onmi-present, overarching (white) eye has the capacity to induce conformity to established rules by internalising social morals and values.
The gallery presentation privileges a vantage point outside the gallery where @futurejuice.xyz glass façade acts as a screen between the viewer and the three components of Smile – CCTV camera, LCD screen, and polariser filter. The glass façade is an architectural feature in which transparency dominates. It’s material qualities invite the gaze of the other into the enclosed inner space. Under different light conditions, glass either transmits or reflects light so that what we think is visible is, in fact, often invisible, and vice versa. When we are allowed to see into the interior it prompts the inhabitant to ask whether they are seen by someone, making them highly aware that they are – potentially – always being watched. When everybody can be surveilled people are more likely to self-regulate and align their behaviour with perceived societal expectations.
Smile raises questions about power and sovereignty, visibility and opacity, care and control, as well as who watches whom in which settings and for what reasons. Locating the audience in the urban environment invites a nuanced discussion that recognises the dispositions of a surveillance society in which racialized peoples are differently profiled, tracked, policed and governed.
