STATEMENT
McEwen’s practice employs photography, printmaking and digital-technologies examining the impact of extraction and digitally mediated experiences on users and the virtual gaze on the body. McEwen unpacks the power of artifice inherent in images and the way users are manipulated and impacted by images within the algorithmically curated attention economy.
As content proliferates and computation extracts resources, the body has become a data asset and agency is corrupted. McEwen interrogates the surveilled body, speculating on ways its extraction is shaping user’s agency and the resulting epistemological shifts in our digital-milieu.
Probing the aesthetic potentials of developing technologies as means to expose, understand and visualise the power structures concealed, McEwen often uses their body as a conduit for investigation, employing expanded methods of photography to foreground the virtual gaze of the body. They mediate this 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 conscious antithesis to the virtual images consumed via the luminosity of screens. Methodologies including printmaking and casting, among others, McEwen constructs solid corporeal statements standing unswerving amongst the fluid cycle of content we consume and generate.