Vivian Lu & Rose Tianyu Qi: Don't Look At Me

Don't Look At Me is an interactive installation in which a life-cast wax sculpture is progressively destroyed by the attention of its viewers. Cameras track visitor gaze in real time; when a viewer looks at the body, a robotic arm directs heat to the observed area, causing the wax to soften, deform, and disappear. The sculpture does not reset. Over the course of the exhibition, it becomes a record of collective attention — a topography of looking rendered in material loss. The work draws a line from the oldest structures of social control to the automated surveillance systems of the present. The interaction requires nothing of the viewer but what they already do: look at a body. No conscious decision to participate, yet the system is already running. The viewer becomes both agent and subject of the same apparatus — observing, being observed, and observing themselves within a loop that mirrors the power dynamics we all inhabit. The wax cannot be restored. Neither can we.