Don't Look At Me

Don’t Look At Me is an interactive installation in which a life-cast wax sculpture is progressively destroyed by the attention of its viewers. When a viewer looks at the body, a robotic arm directs heat to the observed area. The wax softens, deforms, and melts away. The sculpture does not reset. Over the course of an exhibition, it becomes an accumulation of every gaze: a topography of collective attention recorded in material loss.

The interaction requires nothing of the viewer but what they already do: look at a body. No conscious decision to participate, yet the system is already running by tracking the viewer. The viewer becomes both agent and subject of the same apparatus. In a surveillance system, there is no stable position outside it. You observe, you are observed, and you observe yourself. The distinction between the two is temporary, never structural.

The impulse to regulate through looking did not begin with cameras. It is older than technology — encoded in law, dress, and social ritual. What social construct adds is scale and automation: a structure that no longer requires a warden, as it runs on the ordinary behaviour of its participants. No one needs to give orders, and no one feels like an agent of power. However, the damage accumulates quietly, indifferently, at the expense of everybody that passes through the system.

But is it only about surveillance? We have always lived inside systems of power that shape us —systems in which we are, at once, those who enforce and those who are worn away. The wax cannot be restored. Neither can we.