STATEMENT
McEwen’s practice employs photography, printmaking and digital technologies to examine the impact of digitally mediated experiences on users and the paralleling virtual gaze on the body. As content proliferates and digital computation extracts resources, the body has become a data asset. McEwen interrogates the surveilled, commodified and classified body to speculate on the way its extraction is shaping user’s agency and the resulting epistemological shifts in our digital-milieu and future.
McEwen probes the aesthetic potentials of developing technologies as means to expose, understand and visualise the power structures concealed. Using their body as a conduit for investigation, McEwen employs expanded methods of photography such as photogrammetry, gaussian splatting and other filtration to capture a virtual gaze of the body. They mediate the imagery, using computer-optics as a methodology and as an attempt to unveil the impact of algorithmically-curated streams on user’s autonomy and body.
McEwen extends the process by transposing the visual information into a physicality as a conscious antithesis to the virtual images consumed via the luminosity of screens. Using methods of printmaking, casting and more, McEwen constructs a solid corporeal statement standing unswerving amongst the fluid cycle of content we consume and generate.