Spectaculum
Installation
Digital Media
What does it feel like to become the thing being examined?
Almost every woman I know has felt some version of the same anxiety before a gynecological exam, myself included. Spectaculum grew out of wanting an audience to feel that discomfort, not just hear about it. It examines the sociopolitical and psychological systems that influence and limit women, and asks what it means to feel a body's connection to culture and society.
My Role
Solo Designer
Timeline
Nov 2023 - Dec 2024
Industry
Art&Culture, Social Impact
Tools
Adobe AfterEffects, Adobe Photoshop
"In an age where spectacle dictates perception, how do we reclaim agency in our gaze?"
Drawing from theories of performance, surveillance, and digital culture, Spectaculum treats spectacle as both an aesthetic phenomenon and a mechanism of control. Through light, shadow, and mediated imagery, the piece asks its audience to locate themselves inside systems of observation and consumption they usually stand outside of to feel, briefly, what it is to be looked at rather than to look.
Early typographic study tracing how language like "mastering" frames authority over the body.
Test recording combining sign language and text to archive one interviewee's experience of a gynecological exam.
Experience video with flowers as metaphor
"I felt the intensity of all that looking, the cold and exploration.”
Video I: Spectaculum, in the Mirror
720 x 720 px
Video II: Not Just Body
1280 x 800 px
"The installation puts its audience directly inside that scene instead of in front of it."
Mirrors double the viewer's own reflection into the space, so that watching becomes an act you can't separate yourself from. An operating table anchors the room, turning the gallery into an exam room and the audience into patient, observer, or both. The piece isn't a representation of a gynecological exam, but an attempt to transmit its emotional weight: the cold, the exposure, the loss of authorship over your own body. A body stops being a self and becomes something to be observed, assessed, and managed by systems outside its control.
