OPERAND is an interactive installation that makes visible the invisible systems that operate on us — the logos, symbols, and behavioral triggers designed to condition thought, desire, and identity.
The installation presents as a mirror, until one steps into the space revealing an alternate visual with your body rendered as lines and points, a moving diagram drawn in real-time. Your movements fire invisible triggers distributed across the room, each generating sound. Multiple people play together without knowing it — each assigned their own instrument and color palette within a shared score.
The work asks whether recognition is resistance — or whether naming the mechanism only confirms how deep it runs.
‘Power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’. It ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure.
— Michel Foucault
Operand began with a simple thought during a late-night cricket match — was I actually hungry or were the fast-food brand logos flashing on the scorecard every three minutes making it so. From that observation, grew a desire to externalize the logic of invisible triggers, to make perceptible what operates on us without consent.
First shown at Out Of The Blue Too Gallery in 2015, then at FIGMENT Festival in Boston during the following year, Operand drew over a thousand visitors over two days on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.