Under the Gaze is a research-based artistic project that investigates the gaze not as a neutral optical act, but as a relational, political, and epistemic structure that actively produces subjectivity. Developed within the Design and Computation program at UdK/TU Berlin, the project situates itself at the intersection of feminist theory, phenomenology, visual culture, and interactive systems, using the gaze as both an object of inquiry and an operational mechanism.

The core premise of the research challenges the assumption that seeing is a passive or transparent process. Drawing on feminist film theory, particularly Laura Mulvey’s concept of the Male Gaze, alongside phenomenological accounts of embodied perception, the project argues that visibility is always conditioned by power, memory, and cultural framing. To look and to be seen are asymmetrical acts, embedded in social rituals and technological dispositifs that regulate who is allowed to appear, disappear, or speak. The gaze is thus treated as a structuring force that shapes identity, vulnerability, and self-perception rather than merely reflecting them.

On a methodological level, Under the Gaze combines qualitative research practices with artistic experimentation. Through body-mapping workshops, performative interviews, and an extensive historical investigation of the mirror, the project traces how specular devices have long operated as thresholds between knowledge and control. The one-way mirror, in particular, functions as a central conceptual and material hinge. Historically associated with interrogation rooms, therapeutic settings, and surveillance infrastructures, it embodies an asymmetric visual logic that separates seeing from being seen. Rather than rejecting this legacy, the project deliberately recontextualises the one-way mirror as an artistic interface that exposes its latent psychological and political effects.

The practical outcome of the research is an interactive installation in which two participants face each other across a one-way mirror, with visibility modulated through light and eye-tracking systems. The gaze becomes programmable: its duration and direction directly alter conditions of exposure and concealment. In this setup, the body appears and disappears intermittently, echoing theories of the absent body and staging visibility as a performative, contingent event rather than a stable state.

Ultimately, Under the Gaze proposes that perception is never merely sensory, but always negotiated, narrated, and technologically mediated. By transforming surveillance and observation tools into reflective devices, the project opens a space in which participants can critically experience how power, intimacy, and self-knowledge are produced through the act of looking.