LONGING GAZE
HD video, 2022, 12 min. 35 sec. 2021

In the last decades, the problem of technology-related privacy violations was continually presented as an inevitable side effect of progress and growth. Current global crisis made the reflection about the privacy status of a networked individual ever more urgent: due to the restrictions in movement and physical contact, the highly controlled digital networks became the only available channels of communication.

The film “The Longing Gaze” focuses on the notions of “the private” and “the global” evoked by the contemporary health crisis. In a highly poetic manner, the narrative presents a kaleidoscopic mixture of varying experiences of closeness and distance: being locked with another person in a flat for months; observing remote locations thanks to the surveillance network; being observed yourself; being affected by the global events.

In the textual layer, the narrator directs a poem to her lover: she examines details of their physicality (the nose!), analyses their behaviour, describes moments of closeness. This very intimate monologue is positioned against a backdrop of a stream of views from video surveillance cameras and webcams from various locations: spaces empty and neglected due to the Covid crisis, images distorted due to the glitches in data. While the imperfections of machine vision may suggest the general decay of the systems’ surveilling ability, the truth is that the abundance of glitches come from the global ubiquity of the cameras, which themselves are just the eyes of expansive analytical systems. The core idea behind this system is not the perfection of the machine eye, but swiftness of data analysis and data mining.

It is truly paradoxical, that a world of enforced borders and isolation is operated by systems thriving on deterritorialisation and connectivity. Love has a special status in this reality: it is a token of the data market, but it also creates a temporary space of autonomy. The lovers look at the outside world from within their intimate pact; and have the world staring back at their intimacy.