Digital Gaze
Reena Chai
Reena Chai is a Korean-born graphic designer based in New York. Her multidisciplinary practice pursues a playful visual language rooted in conceptual and critical thinking. She works at the intersection of fine arts, design, and literature, hoping to unite the fracture between functional and non-functional, commerce and academia.
Links
Digital Gaze Thesis Dossier
Artist Statement
What does gaze mean in a digital context?
As theoretical and visual research, this thesis project integrates cultural observation with graphic design to seek to understand digital gazing. The study utilizes academic research and puts it in dialogue with personal observations of contemporary culture to offer a reflective assessment of the digital gaze.
Gaze is a social act of looking that involves more than mere literal vision, one that signals a passage of implicit dimensions with conceptual entanglements between viewer and subject. To prevent reducing the concept of the gaze into a narrow meaning, I examine the topic from three different frameworks: Gazing Others, Gaze as Power, and Gazing the Self. The preliminary visual research responds to this framework through essay writing and graphic visualizations. The large-format installation-map counterpart to the visual research displays the interrelationship between these frameworks and the larger optical network associated with the digital gaze.
As theoretical and visual research, this thesis project integrates cultural observation with graphic design to seek to understand digital gazing. The study utilizes academic research and puts it in dialogue with personal observations of contemporary culture to offer a reflective assessment of the digital gaze.
Gaze is a social act of looking that involves more than mere literal vision, one that signals a passage of implicit dimensions with conceptual entanglements between viewer and subject. To prevent reducing the concept of the gaze into a narrow meaning, I examine the topic from three different frameworks: Gazing Others, Gaze as Power, and Gazing the Self. The preliminary visual research responds to this framework through essay writing and graphic visualizations. The large-format installation-map counterpart to the visual research displays the interrelationship between these frameworks and the larger optical network associated with the digital gaze.