Citizen 1 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
This drawing emerges from a shift in perspective within the Extraction series: a top-down view that places the citizen under the unblinking gaze of surveillance, invoking Foucault’s panopticon, a model of power where constant visibility induces self-discipline without the need for visible enforcers, updated to the 21st century through digital panopticism.
Companies like Palantir exemplify this evolution, providing militarized AI tools for drone surveillance in Gaza and contract agreements with police forces worldwide, including UK agencies like Leicestershire and Bedfordshire, to enable predictive policing and real-time data sharing. Capturing the body as raw material in Shoshana Zuboff’s sense: human experience extracted, commodified, and turned into behavioral data for prediction and control. The pavement grid dominates, its lines bisecting the huddled form like coordinates in a targeting system, revealing location, movement patterns, time of day through elongated shadows, and vulnerability to facial recognition algorithms that map features even from above.
Shadows overlap and extend, betraying posture and direction, while the grid itself becomes a carrier of data: every tile a potential node in AI zones, surveillance capitalism’s infrastructure turning public space into a perpetual extraction site, where Palantir’s tools and secretive contracts amplify the harm by enabling mass targeting and behavioral modification.
The citizen curls inward, isolated, yet inescapably located, the human reduced to trace, still casting a shadow that gives everything away.