A giant video installation called “Gaze to the Stars” projected recordings of 200 peoples’ eyes onto the MIT dome last weekend, a well-meaning but dystopian part of the university’s inaugural Artfinity festival.
“Gaze” was a participatory art project cooked up by Behnaz Farahi for MIT’s Critical Matter research group. After participants stepped into what the website calls an “immersive storytelling pod,” an AI feature asked them questions about their hopes and dreams; their eye movements were recorded, and a transcript of their responses. From March 12-14, the videos were cast onto the dome with excerpts of the interviews for all to see.
Supposedly about shared dreams and solidarity, the production isolated participants into individual storytelling pods, leaving them with only a large language model to talk to. The approach uncomfortably resembles AI therapy – a concerning concept that the MIT Media Lab has studied in partnership with OpenAI and that any therapist worth their salt would oppose.
The final video boils each interview down to one sentence, robbing narratives of a specificity that would have been more moving.
Some of the excerpts are powerful, to be fair. (“I am longing for rest,” Ally’s video reads, and Beatriz says she dreams “of a humanity I can be proud to belong to.”) The eye movements are compelling as well. It’s touching to see someone’s eyes look off into the distance while talking about dreams of watching sunsets with friends or making cataract surgery accessible to all.
Yet the steady rhythm of eyes and excerpts ultimately feels generic, and the concept is stale and corporate, far too safe for an artist whose past projects reflected on the surveillance of the male gaze and examined the role in contemporary feminism of the niqāb, a veil worn by some Muslim women.
One wonders if, given the political pressures universities now face, Farahi was asked to defang or depoliticize the piece.
However the project was created, it feels like an uncritical engagement with artificial intelligence, perpetuating a hype universities have embraced. Instead of examining surveillance, this art piece looks like it’s conducting it.
The video was livestreamed March 12-14 and is still available on the project’s website.
Share your own 150-word appreciation for a piece of visual art or art happening with photo to editor@cambridgeday.com with the subject line “Behold.”
The feature image for this post (but not the image seen above) had a portion affected in a digital retouching process. The far upper left of the frame had a second image that was removed; a small portion of sky and tree is not real. The Dome and building was photographed is untouched and real.
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