The Haunting of the Automated Gaze

This article analyzes the artistic exploration of machine vision in the video installation Modern Escape (2018) by Danish artist duo Hanne Nielsen and Birgit Johnsen. The artwork recreates a modern Western home pervaded by surveillance technologies and the automated vision of a robotic vacuum cleaner. The main conceptual idea of the work is the automated gaze , and with few exceptions, all the scenes in the video are filmed without a human behind the camera. As a result, the installation evokes the haunted atmosphere of a home penetrated by a gaze that drifts incessantly, opening up randomly strange and awkward vantage points of the interior. Specifically, the article offers a reading of Modern Escape in the light of Avery Gordon’s notion of “haunting” and argues that the modern Western home is saturated with traces of the military industrial complex through its commonplace technologies, which are haunted by a history of war, complicity, and masculine desires for control. Haunting, according to Gordon, is one way in which “abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life” ( Ghostly Matters xvi). The present article discusses how Modern Escape responds to and questions the subtle militarization of the everyday the technologies carry into the estranged home, “that quintessential space of the uncanny, the haunted house” (Gordon, Ghostly Matters 50).