EVERYTHING IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS
The Sphere Foundation, Moscow, 2021
Contemporary industry is built on attention. Every millisecond, spent on watching content, is precisely recorded and afterwards capitalized on. The catchphrase ‘time is money’ is not as relevant today as it used to be. The most important thing nowadays is how we spend our time and what we pay attention to. The main fight today is the fight for audience attention. That is why in this project I tried to make ‘visible’ the very process of watching, to expose the look by means of which we direct our attention.
In the space of the workshop, which became some sort of a laboratory for me, I started following my own creative process, thus becoming both the examiner and the examinee.
The main object of observation is my own look combined with the cognitive process, which took place during thorough examination of white canvasses (in general, we try to make sense of the very things we are looking at). I followed my look with the help of an eye tracker – a special device widely used in marketing surveys for tracking user behavior and gathering information on the direction where a user looks at a specific moment.
Throughout my experience, at the beginning of which I feared the clean white canvas, I analyzed the qualities artists are valued for: their ability ‘to see something bigger’, to pay attention to details, ‘to change optics’ and, as a result, I reproduced the proverbial artistic look at things.
