What Do You See?

L’œil existe à l’état sauvage.

André Breton

What do you see? website is here: whatdoyousee.io

The Foundation

A vernissage. My works on the walls. Someone stops in front of one, looks for a long moment, and asks: what is this? — meaning: what am I looking at?

The question is reasonable. The works are often difficult to place: they look like paintings but are not paintings, or they are photographs of something that tends to play with perception. The viewer’s category system fails, and they ask for a label.

I rarely give one. Instead I turn the question around. In Italian: tu cosa ci vedi? — cos’è per te? — secondo te cos’è? In English, simply: what do you see? The wording varies; the gesture is the same. I do not want to tell them that this is a door on the Zattere in Venice photographed in close-up. I want to know what they see.

I have always done this, and along the way I started listening differently. Almost no one guesses the referent. And when I eventually reveal what the image is, I see distinct postures emerge: relief at finally having an answer, refusal of the revelation, quiet revision of what was just said in its light, insistence on the original perception against mine. The naming of the object, when it finally happens, does not close the encounter. Sometimes it reopens it.

At a certain point this stopped being incidental to the practice. The pattern itself — that identification is rare, that revelation produces postures, that my withheld answer is generative — was too much material to leave inside casual conversation. I pulled the gesture out of the encounter and gave it its own form.

The Choice Before the Answer

What do you see? is the same question I ask in the gallery. The grammar does not change. What changes is the situation around it.

In front of a work, the question has a referent. There is a here, a this, an object mutually present. The visitor’s task is to perceive that object and name what they perceive in it. The choice is constrained: the field of seeing has been pre-selected by me, by the gallery, by the act of hanging the work on the wall.

The device removes the object. A QR code on a wall, a sticker on a surface, a printed square with no work beside it. The question survives the removal — what do you see? still operates as a question — but the field of seeing is no longer given. Before the visitor can answer, they have to decide what they are looking at.

Themselves. The room. The ceiling. The phone in their hand. A passing thought. The street outside. A memory. The work in front of them, if they happen to be in front of one. Or none of these — something else entirely, something I cannot anticipate.

The device does not specify the field. The field is the visitor’s first decision.

This is what makes What Do You See a research instrument and not a prompt. A prompt directs attention. The device releases it. What it captures is not interpretation, not opinion, not response to a stimulus. What it captures is the trace of two acts performed in sequence: the choice of where to look, and the seeing that follows.

In my own practice, this is exactly the moment I work in. When I photograph a shadow on a coffee surface, when I look up between trees in the Giardini della Biennale and see light instead of foliage, when I pause in front of an old door consumed by salt — there is always a prior moment in which I have selected something as material, against everything else I could have selected. The seeing comes after that choice, but the choice itself is invisible from the outside. It looks like the seeing is spontaneous. It is not. Every act of seeing in an artistic practice begins with a decision about where to direct attention, and that decision is itself the first creative act.

The framework that organizes my practice — The Architecture of a Choice, the four archetypes, the work on entropy and existential resistance — describes the structures that arise once selection has happened. It tells you what the practice is. It cannot tell you how the seeing happens, because the seeing precedes any framework that could describe it.

What Do You See is the device that asks how. By removing the object, it places the visitor in the same position I am in every day: in front of an unspecified request to observe, with the freedom and the weight of deciding where to look.

From a Question to a Device

What Do You See is a website, a database, and a printed QR code. The visitor scans the code, types what they see, sends it. The response is recorded; nothing is returned. The site does not show responses, does not aggregate them, does not display patterns. The asymmetry is structural: the device receives without giving back.

What is collected is a corpus of seeing. Not interpretations of a work. Not opinions about art. The raw data of perception in front of a request that does not specify where to perceive.

What the Device Is Not

It is not participatory art. The visitor is not co-creating anything. The device does not flatter them with the suggestion that their contribution makes them part of the work.

It is not relational aesthetics. There is no encounter, no temporary community, no moment of conviviality. The exchange is one-way and cold by design.

It is not a survey. There is no analysis of opinions, no demographic intent, no hypothesis about what people think.

The responses are not the work. They are raw material that I may, at some point, use in a work of my own — something I cannot yet anticipate, or perhaps nothing at all. Whether such a work will exist, when, and in what form is a decision that belongs to me alone.

What the Device Is

What Do You See is a research instrument. It belongs to the same category of object as the camera, the algorithm, the cyanotype frame — tools I use to acquire material. The difference is that this tool acquires a different kind of material: not light, not images, not data from sensors. It acquires the trace of someone else performing the same act that founds my practice.

The Levels of my Research

My research operates on multiple levels.

The first level is the question of the real: what is information, how does it degrade, why does the second law of thermodynamics matter for an artist. This is the work on entropy.

The second level is the question of meaning: why make anything in a universe tending toward dissolution. This is the existential level, the gesture of Sisyphus, the choice to imagine the artist happy.

The third level is the question of method: how is a practice structured, what archetypes organize the choices, what is a system of order against chaos. This is the framework.

These three levels answer questions about what. What the world is, what art is in it, what the practice is.

What Do You See opens a fourth level. It does not answer a what. It asks a how. How does the choice-and-seeing happen — the act that precedes all the rest. This level is not closable. The other three can be written, published, completed. The fourth one cannot be finished, because as long as the practice continues, the choosing and the seeing continue, and the question continues to deserve to be asked.

This how does not belong to a medium. It is not the how of photography, or of painting, or of generative art. It is the howthat comes before any medium has been chosen. Every medium I work in — photography, algorithmic generation, post-production, cyanotype and more — descends from the same prior act of selecting something as material. The medium is the answer to a question the seeing has already asked.

The Trans-Instance Device

The device does not belong to a single exhibition. It exists independently of any gallery. The same QR code, printed on a sticker, can be left on a wall in the city. A different one can travel inside an elevator. Each printing is a new instance of the same device, each instance produces a different layer of the corpus.

The first public instance opens now. There will be others. The instances differ — the gallery audience is not the audience of a random street, the QR placed beside a hybrid is not the QR placed beside nothing — and the differences between layers are themselves data. They tell me how the choice of where to look changes when the frame around the visitor changes. In a gallery, the hybrid is an obvious candidate for the object the visitor will reconstruct. On a wall in the street, there is no obvious candidate. The visitor has to find one or invent one. The device works in both cases, because the question is the same. Only the field of possible answers shifts.

The device persists. The corpus accumulates. The investigation continues.

What I Hope For

I hope for nothing in particular. The device produces knowledge in any case. If many people respond, I will have a rich corpus. If few respond, I will have learned something about the threshold at which strangers are willing to expose their perception to a request from a stranger. If no one responds, I will have learned that, too. The silence is also a measurement.

One must imagine the artist happy.