Peeping Tom
If intimacy is turned into trace, then representation is also a political question. My practice in metadata aesthetics materializes the very grammar of extraction so that intimacy becomes visible as form itself. The point is not to expose private lives, but to expose the systems that manufacture privacy as a product. The violence of privacy, its marketed fantasy of intimacy that legitimizes systems which
extract information to become a tool of control. In my visual research, I delve into
themes of intimacy and its commodification by external powers driven by profit, politics and
mass population control. My artworks expresses that by metadata aesthetics creating illusions of life. Imitation of a human body carved in a material that itself is alive, while the installation is stagnant to work as a facade.
The web gives me tags, thumbnails, recommendations, and profiles. I push them into a physical material so they stop feeling abstract. In my engravings, language becomes flesh and metadata becomes its shadow. My practice materializes these mechanisms. I translate the invisible into form by treating data traces as the new urban residue. ASCII is not just a nostalgic style choice, but a reduction that exposes the structure of its skeleton. It turns a gaze into text, a profile into pattern, and a private act into a readable surface. By rendering these mechanisms in low resolution, I refuse the high definition and relate it to the lack of transparency we face on the internet. Surveillance and reframed intimacy as something negotiated, and structurally exposed. The work holds the viewer in the same paradox, the feeling of looking, while being looked through.
