Stock Eyes

[2022] Two years after COVID-19, two years after we enthusiastically lost interest in the NFT market or, in some cases, slowly started losing it, my eyes used to stare a lot at the blank white wall in my apartment. I barely archived anything at the time. I was new to using platforms like the Internet Archive and Are.na(1), and I was not adjusting my Google search filters. Because everything was right there: on the Internet. We were more than welcome to take more than we could ever carry and stock up on whichever device we got. But it was not as if we could stop the Big Four from ruining it all for us only a few years later. Probably as a consequence, our eyes, eating from the open palm of the Internet, kind of forgot how to limit themselves for their own sake of self-protection. 

[Since 2022] We are no longer exposed to the deterministic online experience of limited computing power that would actually provide us with the piece of information we are looking for. 

[2025] In June, I was trying to help my girlfriend with making a low-key A2-level French presentation on Bauhaus. I was about to find an image of an Italian Bauhaus villa I recalled  from my architecture classes. When typing the phrase into Google Search, nothing relevant about the Bauhaus movement popped up, no interesting stories about the building on the coasts of Italy and no academic articles. Nothing but ads, really. “Modern Bauhaus” or “Bauhaus-style” villas on booking.com or other property websites, looking more or less interchangeable. Soul-sucking, miniature, low-resolution window images that I refused to click on awed by how fast my eyes had already scanned four Google pages, and each time they had proofread something legit, they were mistaken. My patience was being tested. I clenched my jaw so tightly that I began to feel glad that at least I realized how much I slouch and ruin my bite by conducting this unnecessarily intense search for a single image for the presentation. I deeply regret that I did not record the specific names of a few of these villas when they were shown to me. My information-seeking eyes move through the Internet of the vibe-coding era of clustered and oversaturated search engines. These eyes witness the fast-fashionisation of software – a cycle of relentless updates and expendable digital products. Its creation and maintenance consume more natural resources than ever before, from the energy of vast data centers to minerals in our devices. Simultaneously, it also exploits more human resources through precarious coding labour, content moderation, and the attention economy. But in this specific search for information, particularly the kind I have a feeling I once knew but cannot recall the name of, and which I never noted down anywhere, my eyes are powerless; therefore, I am.

Do you keep a personal archive? 

In a documentary “How It’s Made”, which I remember from my childhood, it was shown how they produce the Fiat 126. Sometimes I imagine watching a similar documentary, but informing on how and why on the Internet we see an ocean of useless words when looking for some piece of information or visual component. A literal “How It’s Made”, because I do not know how and why the Internet went that bad that fast. If I tried to type down the question to Google, I would probably receive some half-statement by Gemini – cobbled together from a bunch of hollow and nebulous articles, probably going for selling something or using their surface to tire our eyes with ads. This particular type of add that irritates my entire nervous system, which I would like to be able to block out forever, because it inflames my eyes, forcing them to watch a single mother with a child who can save her family from poverty only if she undergoes bimbofication and stops reeking of green. In consequence, a tall brunette in a suit abandons his upstart lover for her. And to achieve this – the mother’s happiness – all I have to do is move some blocks on the board. Which is really uncanny because it’s not an arcade game. It’s mud, the quicksand of contemporary internet visual culture. An advertisement for a game named “Garden Scapes,” which you can avoid if you have enough money to block ads on every website. After all, you won’t see such ads outdoors – on billboards or at underground stations. 

And there are other, less recent, disturbing ads on websites that I don’t want to click on because I will certainly be greeted by a gigantic, simply too large, request for permission to use cookies. My eyes have been trained. I can anticipate this. Being exposed to so many of these commercial intrusions has conditioned me to scrutinize everything, searching for places where I wouldn’t see it. And looking at anything considering my eyes’ safety. 

Do you relax your jaw regularly when looking at stuff online? 

[2022–2026] In search of controlled perception – agency-oriented perception – I could look into search filters and simply exclude everything created after 2022. As I suggested at the beginning, this was the year of The Change, was it not? But change here is not a single moment; it is a field that plays out before our very eyes. And my question, as someone without a digital personal archive, and the tangible, if chaotic physical one, is: Can we look at art in 2026 when every day we look at everything and nothing at the same time? Just as a physical archive demands a slower, more deliberate kind of attention, perceptual agency requires a different kind of discipline, which resists the pace of the feed. How can we process looking at a still life when we are being conditioned to become one? 

I am concerned about the condition, quality, and production of art. At the same time, I worry about sight, vision, and eye-training. I worry about our brains, which are more and more interested in seeing “everything.” Accelerating into dopamine release only if they saw everything: in all potential directions, perchance dimensions – as if the limits of being moved at the quality of everything, all the details at once, only could determine that known feeling of satisfaction stripped of anything else that would be anyhow new or surprising. Capturing everything, the total sequence of details at one moment, as the destination. Just like the Internet offers us everything, because that was its goal, was it not, to maximize the generosity of information provided (providing?). 

On the Internet, everything is 80% something and 20% nothing. The Internet’s “everything” is bloated. Which makes our eyes bloated, to the point we seek to steal someone else’s eyes to be less overstimulated ourselves. Or generate them. Obtain “stock eyes,” useful to ignore the need for wonder and stick to merely staring. And to trash them as soon as they are used. Non-recyclable “stock eyes” are lying in conical piles next to every pop-up window with an advertisement with a picture. Piles of rubbish that, over time, can obscure our view from the level of our organic and weak eyes.