SITUATION #157

In today’s digital attention economy, the eye’s gaze has become a valuable currency, monetised by major corporations that circulate visual information and attention across digital devices and media platforms. With the help of eye-tracking devices and software, what captures our attention can be meticulously traced and analysed, our individual and collective looking behaviours exploited for advertising purposes and commercial applications. In Flamingos, Moonrise and the Slippers, Indre Urbonaite explores and poetically transforms this visual capital in which looking has become a profitable form of labour. Selecting three stock photos – of a flamingo strolling in shallow water, a moon rising above the mountains and an image of slippers stuck in golden beach sand – the artist collaborated with the eye-tracking company RealEye to capture the traces of the gaze as its scans the visual information. What is left is an image of our gaze – a pixelated trace not of what, but how our eyes perceive – simultaneously revealing and concealing the logics of attention of our visually-dominated twenty-first century.

More by Indre Urbonaite: indreurbonaite.com