Photography / Virtual Gaze, by Annabelle McEwen. At PhotoAccess until October 18. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

Virtual Gaze is an act of individual resistance against corporate surveillance.

Data centres are the cathedrals of our age – repositories of personal data collected by governments and corporates to manipulate and control our behaviours.

Cameras are set up in stores to capture our faces so that these can be matched with other sets of our personal data. The cameras catch our facial expressions, the time spent in various locations… every single measurable thing. As for stores, so for public spaces.

The Cohn-Kanade Dataset is one the keystones of the data centres. Not one person in a thousand has heard of it. Yet each of us has probably already been virtually touched by it many, many times.

How?

The Dataset establishes hundreds of standardised facial expressions. It is used by governments and corporates to register, stratify, interpret, and store our facial expressions.

McEwen co-opts several expressions from the Dataset, applies them to her face, and flips the intent by expressing her individuality in a way that is deliberately open to the public gaze.

In the face of the literally untouchable digital assault on our freedom, McEwen resorts to physicality. Exhibition works include: prints on vinyl; etched copper with silicon frames; prints on BFK Rives (a fine grained paper); busts created using graded sand, calcium aluminate cement, calcium carbonate and polyvinyl acetate homopolymer resin; and, a dye sublimation print on carpet tile.

This physicality is contrasted with a video loop. In Data Centre (Smile you’re on candid camera) 2026 several of the standard facial expressions are viewed through a camera focusing frame.

The creative results have a highly inventive and a uniformly excellent technical quality. Satisfyingly, the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.

A sense of power lies at the heart of this exhibition. Virtual Gaze is a solitary act of assertion: I am because I exist in three dimensions. I am visible. I am touchable. It also has a defiant quality: What are You Looking at?

Yet it is a solitary political act as opposed to being a call to organised arms. By way of contrast, the Virtual Gaze is backed by heavily funded, well-organised and purposeful global entities. They mean business.

Medieval cathedrals are historical relics. One wonders what the future will bring to data centres.

Virtual Gaze is a cracker of an exhibition.