My work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order. I employ archetypes and referents as starting points. For several years I have been committed to working with already-existing data or phenomena, in order to propose a connection between individuals and wider forces, or larger scales, or longer time-bases. And thus reconsider what a society or a community is engaged in, and therefore the individuals, in their everyday life.

The city is a fundamental expression of complexity and the exclusive creation of man. It embodies altogether artifice and sensation, the expressions of human mind.

There are 3 words I would like to define: Transparency, Visibility, and Access.

Transparency
Since Bentham’s Panoptic (1780), a circular shaped prison allowing one single guard to check all the prison cells in a glance, and since the Crystal Palace in London (1851), a glass and iron structure, architecture has given itself to instating transparency, even more if the decision to allow vision to pass through building material is not the unique architectural form of staging transparency. For example: bared concrete walls, or external plumbing and wires, etc.

Transparency has now become a fundamental notion in political, economic, and media discourses. Included in its values are those of information and communication, control and surveillance.

Visibility
Transparency, in divulging itself, attempts to take over the invisible. Everything is visible. Going from clarity to clarity, what has disappeared is not the visible, but the invisible. Now, the invisible is the human body’s distance from the real; the ability of its free enquiry, the possibility of the autonomy of thought. My research into artifice and sensation questions the status of the image, no longer considered under the auspices of the symbol; in other words, not as an absence which presents itself, but as a contract, a social pact, that endorses proof of the presence of the real. Adhesion remains the condition of visibility no matter what form it takes: faith, belief, desire, or interests.

Transparency, as a democratic belief and value, is a new figure of visibility.

Access
One of the constitutive elements for the landmarks and referents of the contemporary city can be defined as the notion of access: the right of access or its other half, exclusion. Access to information, services, activities, sites or objects. It takes the form of real or figurative security gates: such as smart cards, wireless data, passwords, etc. We carry with us, both physically and mentally, the constitutive elements of our perceptual reference points.

The technology of x-rays is emblematic of surveillance devices, not only those which detect organs or infected cells in the human body, or hidden commodities in transport containers, but also those which detect encoded information, be it organic, inorganic, or computational, translate them and activate actions in return. X-rays are analogous with the stakes of ideological transparency.

Transparency is the name given to the control of visibility, and surveillance is the technique that Western world enterprise developed to control the quality of transparency.