Erin Robinson

Eye See You

London, UK, 2025

Interactive installation, facial recognition, real-time graphics
Eye See You is an interactive audiovisual installation that explores the dynamics of surveillance, affective computing, and the spectacle of being seen. The system works as face-tracking camera system that isolates and fixates upon the viewer's eyes, extracting and analysing emotional states through machine learning algorithms. This relentless visual tether, a technological gaze that does not blink, converts spectators into subjects of scrutiny. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s notion of the eye as both a symbol of eroticism and a site of transgression, Eye See You displaces the traditional relation between seer and seen. The viewer, once sovereign, becomes a node in a machinic circuit of observation and interpretation. Bataille’s fascination with the eye as a destabilising force—linked to violence, intimacy, and the sacred—is reanimated in the cold optical logic of AI, now retooled to extract meaning rather than mystery. Rather than offering vision as a mode of understanding, the installation presents it as a mechanism of exposure. The act of looking is not neutral; it is inscribed with power, translated into metrics, and potentially weaponized. Eye See You invites viewers to confront their own legibility under digital regimes of perception, asking what is lost, or gained, when affect becomes readable. In collaboration with sound artist Jamie Turner.
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