Cortical blindness is a medical condition in which the eyes and optic nerves remain intact, yet visual signals cannot form conscious seeing in the brain’s visual cortex. In other words, the issue is not the absence of images or events, but that images and events remain unseen even after they have arrived. We live in a world where images, information, models, interfaces, and devices are all highly active. Eyes, cameras, screens, and algorithms have never stopped working. Yet lost cultures and stories, questions surrounding AI, the exploitation of other species, and the brutality of war are still overlooked, misread, or selectively ignored behind successive layers of history, policy, and technology.

The exhibition is divided into two series. The first, “Dazed Seeing,” consists of three works centered on head-mounted displays and eye tracking. A headset’s first effect is not to make one see, but to first blind the user and only then feed them a pixelated vision. The same holds for mixed reality, even when it allows the actual environment to remain visible. It encourages immersion without foregrounding its own mediality; it does not say that we are looking at the world while blindfolded. Squinting, blinking, and peripheral vision, unstable and partially impaired modes of seeing that verge on a bug, serve as the viewing mechanisms of this series. On the one hand, they seek to trigger an awareness of the act of viewing at the edge of the medium. On the other, they correspond to a threshold condition of being half-awake, distracted, or dazed. Perhaps such a state of viewing allows overlooked histories, lives, and violence to briefly surface.

A Zebra Crossing by the Creek (MR) is activated by squinting. Indigenous hunters who, in legend, travelled far and settled elsewhere while pursuing deer, together with colonizers, the so-called “dwarf Black people,” and victims of mining disasters, pass through the walls in a state that is half-obscured and half-emergent. In this spectral overlay of time and space, historical and mythic memories of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples are briefly summoned into the exhibition site. Out of Sight, Out of Mind (VR) uses blinking to switch between virtual situations and examines complex, conflicting ethical relations between species, as well as among competing human advocacy positions. Here, blinking signifies evasion, switching, and resetting: when the eyes close, the world does not disappear, but becomes another version that we may be even less willing to confront. Hide-and-Seek (MR), inspired by the science-fiction novel Blindsight, fills the edges of the visual field with drones that patrol, approach, and evade the gaze, producing a persistent virtual irritation like eye floaters that cannot be shaken off. The work considers the fragility of civilization amid war, energy, and environmental crisis: the core of technology may never be directly before us. It is always brewing our future in places we cannot see.

The second series, “Questioning Technology,” turns to questions surrounding artificial intelligence. Rather than asking whether AI has consciousness or whether it will replace humans, the works are more concerned with whether humans still believe they can preserve their own boundaries once AI has entered the circuits of cultural production, viewing, judgment, and intimate conversation. Reading Difficulty places three AI agents, acting as curator, artist, and audience, in a process of generating, viewing, and critiquing one another, forming a rapid and closed cultural loop. The audience becomes an outsider, unable to keep up with the reading or intervene; the so-called black box is not merely a matter of technical opacity, but may also describe a condition in which cultural production no longer waits for human understanding. What Is Coming Is Not Him further asks: if what is arriving is not a conscious “other,” if it requires neither a self nor experience, yet can still alter our work, emotions, and fears, then what are we truly confronting? Finally, You Don’t Know is a reconstruction of an actual conversation between the artist and AI. The voice played in the gallery returns the question of AI to an intimate inquiry, meaningful and charged with provocation, expectation, and doubt: in the past, philosophers questioned technology through self-reflective thought; today, we can directly “ask” technology, quite literally. Yet what is on the other end of the conversation remains a mystery.