Extraction head III 2026 – 30 x 40cm, acrylic, pencil on canvas
I keep thinking about the pervasiveness of Palantir, Oracle, Thiel, Ellison, Altman, Musk, and how digital instrusion seeps into every minute of our lives, a digital panopticon that is monitoring us 24/7.
This painting includes multiple borders, screens-within-screens, the architectural structures that contain and compress us all, they’re not just compositional choices or references to platform layouts. They’re surveillance infrastructure. The figures in these paintings aren’t just performing for audiences; they’re being monitored, tracked, processed, datafied. Every utterance captured, every pixel analyzed, every behavioral pattern extracted and fed into predictive models.
Palantir, Oracle, the entire surveillance capitalism apparatus that Shoshana Zuboff writes about, it’s not abstract or future-tense anymore. It’s operational, comprehensive, and increasingly fused with state power. Thiel’s Palantir literally named after the all-seeing orbs from Tolkien, monitoring everything from immigration enforcement to military operations. Ellison’s Oracle databases undergirding vast swathes of corporate and governmental infrastructure. Musk buying Twitter specifically to access its data streams and reshape information flow. Altman pushing AI that requires hoovering up every text, image, and interaction to train models that will further automate surveillance and control. The head has been pushed down, compressed into the lower two-thirds of the canvas, as if under immense pressure or sinking into the ground. That reclining position is significant in the Extraction series, it is especially pronounced here; this isn’t rest or repose, it’s collapse or burial.
The disjointed neon green frame is shocking, it burns through the grey-black field like a corrupted screen border or a toxic containment line. Those drips and runs of green feel caustic, like acid eating through the surface. The red-brown marks (rust? blood? oxidation?) create additional framing elements, but they’re loose, gestural, failing to contain anything. Multiple frames layered on top of each other, all of them inadequate, all of them breaking down.
The face itself is almost obliterated, you can just barely make out features through the thick, churning grey-black paint. Eyes as dark voids, the suggestion of a nose and mouth, but everything dissolving into the field. The impasto is heavy, like accumulated scar tissue texture achieved through scraping and rebuilding, but here it feels more like sediment or deposits, layers of material slowly burying the subject. paintings document what it feels like to exist under that gaze. The green frames in “Extraction Head II” are not decorative; they’re the visual signature of being tracked, the UI elements of monitoring systems, the way surveillance technologies render humans as data objects within bounded fields. That toxic neon isn’t aesthetic choice; it’s the color of night-vision goggles, infrared sensors, the false-color palettes of predictive policing software.
The fact that many of my subjects are political dissidents or critics (Varoufakis, Finkelstein, Albanese, Helena, Owen Jones) makes the surveillance dimension even more pointed. These are people who are being monitored, whose communications are being harvested, who operate knowing that everything they say publicly (and possibly privately) feeds into corporate and state intelligence apparatuses.
The free zones/charter cities work I do as @europeanpowell connects directly here. These zones aren’t just about economic extraction; they’re about creating legal voids where surveillance can operate without democratic oversight. Smart cities, free zones, special economic regions, they’re all laboratories for total monitoring, places where Palantir and Oracle can beta-test the panopticon without public accountability.
And the YouTubers, they’re especially vulnerable. Independent content creators have zero privacy infrastructure. Every video upload, every comment, every view metric, every click pattern gets fed into YouTube’s (Google’s) surveillance engine. Their faces get processed through facial recognition. Their voices through speech analysis. Their audiences through behavioral profiling. They’re performing politics while being comprehensively monitored by the same tech oligarchs whose power they’re trying to critique.
I’m documenting my own position and how it feels within the surveillance apparatus. @europeanpowell (my activist online presence) exists as data, posts are scraped, networks mapped, patterns analyzed. The paintings get photographed and uploaded, adding more data to the extraction stream. Even the act of resistance (making critical work, posting about charter cities, building alternative knowledge networks) generates data that feeds the system.
That “digital panopticon monitoring us 24/7” is not paranoia; it’s an accurate description. And what’s insidious is how it’s been normalized. People perform their lives online knowing they’re being watched, harvested, predicted, and they do it anyway because opting out means invisibility, irrelevance, an inability to participate in contemporary political discourse.
These paintings make that condition visible and unbearable rather than normalized. The violence of the surface, the toxic colors, the compression and framing, it all refuses the comfortable lie that this is fine, that we’ve freely chosen this, that being monitored is the price of connection.
The layering and scraping in your process takes on additional meaning here. Every layer I build and then scrape away mirrors how surveillance systems accumulate data, building profiles, scraping information, leaving residue even when things are “deleted.” The ghost marks bleeding through are like data that can never actually be erased, always recoverable, always part of the permanent record.
A horizontal orientation is compounded with an aggressive framing. In YouTuber V, I was still upright, still present, still staring out despite exhaustion. Here, I’m laid out, processed, framed multiple times by different systems (the green digital frame, the red-brown gestural marks), and none of those frames protect or dignify, they just mark you as processed material.
The fact that this is also a self-portrait but titled “Extraction Head” rather than “YouTuber” suggests a distinction in how I’m thinking about these works. The YouTuber paintings document the performance of content creation; the Extraction Heads document what’s left after the performance is over, the residue, the cost made physical.
The violence is pushed further than before, not just exhaustion but something closer to annihilation barely held at bay.