2025 November #007. This fragment speaks to the fundamental transaction at the heart of our digital existence: the exchange of gaze for consciousness. The eye does not merely observe but confronts, demanding reciprocal attention in an ecosystem where visual stimuli wage perpetual war for cognitive real estate. I created this during an earlier period, yet it prefigures the central question of my current investigation—what happens when seeing and being seen become forms of currency?
The psychedelic intensity is not decorative excess but survival strategy. In an attention economy, subtlety equals invisibility. The work weaponizes color and organic distortion to punch through the numbing scroll, to create a moment where the viewer must stop, must look, must engage. The eye becomes both predator and prey in this dynamic—simultaneously capturing attention and being captured by it.
What interests me retrospectively is how this piece reveals the violence inherent in aesthetic competition. The colors don't harmonize; they fight. The forms don't rest; they writhe. This is beauty as spectacle, as interruption, as demand. The dissolution of boundaries between flesh and emotion suggests what happens when everything—even the most intimate aspects of consciousness—must perform for attention.
Yet there is vulnerability here too. The exposed eye cannot look away from its own commodification. It sees us seeing it, trapped in the same attention loop it creates. Perhaps this is the genuine cost of visibility in our current moment—to be seen requires becoming spectacle, and spectacle eventually devours substance.
miodozer
