“Please Look, Don’t Touch” is a photo-sculptural series that explores how human beings interact with digital technology, trading physical contact and proximity for looking and displaying. Like objects in a store or a museum display case, online we look at each other but don’t touch. Instead, we live in a world of surveillance in which we both surveil ourselves and we are in turn surveilled. This is intimacy without the intimate, where human value is measured in views, and algorithms we neither control nor understand probe and profit from our engagement.

Using the display case as a “stage” on which we “reenact” our digitally mediated world, this project features a custom-built plexiglass box placed in various public settings like parks, parking lots, and city streets. At times individuals or objects are inside the box, at times they are adjacent, and on occasion people inside the case interact with those who are not. These mobile and temporary site-specific installations, which are documented photographically, invite both subjects and audience into a multi-layered visual dialogue. Like reflections on the surface of the case itself, interactions with this sculptural intermediary mirror the way we engage with and resist against power in the digital ecosystem - simultaneously connected and disconnected, revealed and concealed, consuming and consumed.