Irene Fenara

How do machines see? That’s been the key question at the he- art of Irene Fenara’s work since 2016, when her imagery began to incorporate material drawn from video surveillance systems. It all started with the development of a working method that is simple and original, yet open to a vast web of complexities. Fenara takes advantage of a flaw in the system: the instructions and factory passwords for remotely accessing the main brands of sur- veillance cameras can easily be found online. If these codes have been left unchanged by the end user (which happens surprisingly often), one can enter a given system and see everything that the corresponding device is recording, sometimes even adjusting its movements and settings. A system of control thus becomes a potential threat to private security. The desire to see everything ends up courting the danger of being seen. Irene enara explores the space between these two extremes, harnessing the unexpected possibility of accessing images that are only theoretically pro- tected. The resulting projects are characterized by a completely antivoyeuristic approach, in which the yearning to infiltrate the lives of others is replaced by an aspiration to enter their devices: “the sex appeal of the inorganic,” as Mario Perniola put it. It is like Ballard’s Crash, where the ascendancy of touch is sup- planted by the sense of sight.

 The projects that Fenara makes out of the images captured by surveillance systems, culminating in her Supervision series, spring from what is really a salvage operation. The footage recorded by these devices tends to be stored for just 24 hours before being automatically erased and overwritten. Fenara selects and preserves it. She intervenes in an incessant process of deleting the visible, and thwarts its com- pletion. It’s digital conservationism. The result is a series of stills extracted from a slow, steady flow of molten imagery which trigger a chain of wide-ranging thoughts: about the normalization of surveillance; about the sense of insecurity that has increasingly pervaded our living space since the turn of the millennium, fomenting suspicion towards the “other”; about privacy and its fragmentation; about “hacking the system” as an everyday practice of survival; about the line between legal and illegal; about overtness and banality; about using participatory processes to create an artwork; about taking photographs without a camera; about the relationship between human and machine; about how machines see.

 Francesco Zanot