Data Shadows ( 2013-present) is a long-term photographic investigation into the physical infrastructure of the Internet and digital surveillance. Though often imagined as invisible and immaterial (intentionally coined “the cloud”), the Internet is grounded in a vast apparatus of cables, routers, and server farms, concentrated in massive data centers around the globe.

This work operates as a form of counterveillance—a symbolic gesture that turns the act of looking back onto the systems that track us. By making visible the hidden architectures and machines that shape our lives, the project challenges the invisibility of surveillance and data extraction. It seeks to reveal the material and perceptual mechanisms through which our identities are recorded, fragmented, and controlled, while inviting reflection on our complex relationship with power, visibility, and agency in the digital age.

The term data shadows refers to the residual data we leave behind through online activity: images, messages, GPS coordinates, metadata, and more. These digital traces act as extensions of ourselves—shaping how we are perceived, categorized, and acted upon, often without our knowledge. As daily life becomes increasingly entangled with data collection and algorithmic governance, we remain only vaguely aware of how our identities are abstracted and leveraged by corporations, governments, and machine systems.

An early and central component of the project is an interactive installation that uses photography and eye-tracking to explore surveillance as both personal and systemic. A viewer stands before a blank screen. As their gaze moves across it, a small circle of an image appears beneath their line of sight, revealing parts of photographs taken from inside data centers. The rest of the screen remains black. The effect is a tunnel of vision controlled by one viewer at a time, while a second projection displays their accumulated gaze path in another part of the space. This secondary display tracks their act of looking and reveals it to others as a live eye-drawing through images of data centers. Surveillance becomes reciprocal, fluid, and fractured.

Data Shadows seeks to make tangible the architectures and power structures behind our networked lives—creating visual and experiential forms for what is often concealed, denied, or abstracted into the illusion of immateriality.