EYE PILLS — real-time data installation by KIENESOYO (Javier Guijarro Fayard)

EYE PILLS is an installation with two 45-inch screens and two computers. The programme performs a real-time scratching of the internet, extracting emotional signals from 255 international news and information feeds. The result is a data map of isobars where eyeballs appear, disappear, move, redden and grow tired.

The work addresses informational overexposure and the perceptual schizophrenia of the present. The gaze is no longer a neutral operation: looking modifies what is seen. Each time the eyes appear on the map, the piece suggests that our perception of the objective is altered by the algorithms that select what we see, by the history of our searches and by systems that anticipate what we desire to receive.

EYE PILLS does not simply represent eyes. It constructs a visual architecture in which observing and being observed become the same operation. Through Félix Guattari, the work can be understood as an image machine: a device in which the image acts not as a passive window onto the world, but as an active force that produces perception, desire, memory and behaviour. The gaze appears here as a pill: a repeated dose of surveillance, comparison and dependency.