III. The Mirror and the Maze
— Designing Spaces of Mutual Gaze

When I began Did You See Me?, I was no longer building images but constructing conditions, places where the act of seeing itself could be felt. I wanted the viewer to move slowly, to hesitate, to feel the weight of their own gaze. The installation became a small room enclosed by translucent curtains, where AI-generated images drifted across layers of fabric. The air carried its own pulse of light and shadow. Inside, the viewer’s body was not outside the work; it was part of its breathing.

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The work did not try to represent a dream; it behaved like one. Gaston Bachelard once wrote that the dreamer lives “in the house of their own consciousness,” where corners hold memory and shadows remember touch (Bachelard, 1994). I wanted to recreate that house, but one where the walls could melt, where memory could be seen as light passing through fabric. The domestic materials—lace, resin, wooden toys—were never props. They were fragments of my grandmother’s house, reassembled through distortion, returning as something between comfort and ghostliness.

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Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society describes our age as one obsessed with exposure, where we show everything yet see nothing (Han, 2015). Against that transparency, I wanted opacity. The curtains concealed as much as they revealed. The viewer was forced to bend, to slow down, to cross thresholds. In those gestures, something changed: looking became embodied, vulnerable, mutual. For a moment, the gaze was no longer one-directional; it folded back.

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Some viewers later said they felt watched by the projection itself. That moment fascinated me, when the image, stripped of narrative, begins to look back. It reminded me that visibility is never innocent. To be seen is always to be interpreted, reshaped, and sometimes misread. In that sense, Did You See Me? was never about showing my dreams but staging a shared condition of seeing and being seen, a mirror that remembers differently each time someone enters.

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During installation, I learned to surrender. The space began to move on its own, like a breathing organism. It was no longer a room I built but one that built itself around the viewer. In its fragility, I found a quiet truth: that the most honest structures are those that do not hold still.

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In Did You See Me?, I stopped asking what the dream meant. I began to ask how it felt, to stand inside a vision that looks back at you, to lose orientation, to sense your presence dissolve into fabric and light. The mirror and the maze became one. The image was no longer mine alone. It belonged to the act of seeing itself.

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References

Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Han, B. C. (2015) The Transparency Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock Publications.

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Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Still from Did You See Me? (2025)
an AI-generated video installation exploring perception, dream, and mutual gaze.