Seeing was made with Twine and contains several soundscapes I recorded, mostly in the Rastro (market) in Madrid, Spain. It is an immersive exploration into alternatives to the male gaze. You enter into a narrative and eventually get to choose both the objects (human or not) you look at and how you look at them. The choices – the way you choose to experience the world – affect the endings you encounter. It has soundscapes that change as the mood of the story does

My aim was to create a piece that could be consumed anywhere, but that could lead to an intimate experience in a public setting (be it a gallery, a classroom), which is something I always find exciting and interesting when it happens to me. So far it’s been exhibited in a couple of gallery shows and the feedback I received was that it was pretty much working out the way I’d hoped. That said, the piece is still open to change.

What I was thinking about when I made it:
– Breaking the male gaze instead of flipping it (flipping it being: straight woman objectifies man, “he’s just a boy toy”, etc.)
– It´s constraining that anything other than the male gaze tends to be defined in opposition to it.
– Subject-object gaze exchange.
– The gaze is relatively easy to break without the element of sex or desire. But how do you break traditional gaze when there is desire?
– Alternate gazes: different bodies, subjectivized objects, etc

A couple of notes on making it (you can disregard this section, I just thought I’d add some notes, in lieu of including a video):

At a certain point I considered including a scoring system, which is something I’ve done with other projects, but considered it would undercut the melancholy of several parts and draw away from the unease of others. For my Master’s degree thesis I’m looking at generational differences in the emotional perception of liminal spaces in digital art/literature. The research is still in early stages, but the interviews conducted thus far make me think that melancholy seems to be a fertile ground for thought and change. I’d rather preserve it in this particular piece of writing.

One of my favorite things when writing or making art is to ask questions and just in general marvel at the dynamics we’ve developed or are capable of developing. A few years ago, I co-founded and ran Las Marías (New York, 2016-2020), a bilingual gender justice education project based on critical pedagogies that had an underlying curriculum but used pop culture/political analysis and a horizontal classic 60s and 70s consciousness raising groups approach to address the materials. I would have liked to make something like Seeing to use it in the workshops at that point in time. I still find that a cultural and emotional experience is an ideal vehicle for outreach and connection.

Thank you for your consideration!