Inspired by livestream platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, viewers of the film could react with a variety of emojis while watching the film. The remote control concept was inspired by Halim Lee's Are.na TV and adapted from Vlad Racoare's code.

One form of surveillance that the film covers is "imposed" surveillance or unwanted surveillance. The still on the left below takes advantage of facial recognition UI and heat maps, technologies used to keep track of people. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in the film, I was also interested in the politics using these technologies against marginalized communities and is something I hope to explore in the future. The use of facial recognition technology against these communities simultaneously makes individuals hyperspecific but reduces them to a certain kind of profile. This was also influenced by Trevor Paglen's They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead... (2019) piece and his "Training Humans" exhibition with Kate Crawford.

The sequence also covers John Berger's third essay in Ways of Seeing or the Male Gaze, a term coined by Laura Mulvey. This is a feminist take on imposed surveillance, with the main difference being that the subject knows they are being watched. Hence, they perform for the watcher.

Another portion of the film briefly looks at "luxury surveillance," as explored and defined by Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia in Real Life Magazine. I created a fictional online store, and on the homepage, a video shows a child being recorded by a baby monitor—commonly used by parents in order to watch over their children.

During the development of this project, I came across Trevor Paglen's essay "Frontier Photography" originally published in Artforum (now published on his website as a PDF), "Luxury Surveillance" by Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia, and "Camera Traps" by Lauren Collee.

Using the themes of those essays, I strung together a narrative begins with trail cameras (and unwanted surveillance). Then, it begins to look more closely at the relationship between wildlife photography and the military and how the camera/frame may be used as a weapon.

One portion of the film focuses specifically on how our response to images have transformed over time. Whereas the Napalm Girl photograph shifted American public sentiment towards ending the Vietnam War in the 1970s, we are now living in an age where we are constantly bombarded by images of violence. We are desensitized to violence, so war imagery especially no longer has the same impact as it did during the Vietnam War.

The use of artificial intelligence to generate images also blurs our reality, further distorting our understanding of current events happening around the world. Artificial intelligence also enables the everyday user to generate content that pushes their agenda and biases.