Thank You For Coming/I Love You/Can I Keep You?

By Anant Saraf

Each viewer faces a screen that represents them as a mosaic of every face that has previously viewed the work. The work records and remembers the faces of every viewer that approaches it. The size of each tile changes based on the distance of the viewer to the work- the closer you get, the more detail you see, and the more finely you’re captured. If to have someone’s image is the most accessible way to have them, “Thank You For Coming/I Love You/Can I Keep You?” asks what it means to be made up of all the people we have ever encountered.

While this work initially started as a wholesome idea– that the work is grateful to those that view it (Thank you For Coming), that we’re made up of all the people we’ve ever met (I Love You), the methods with which it achieves this idea–a surveillance apparatus, lack of consent– led to the work’s reception as an unsettling one (Can I Keep You?).

Acknowledgements: Initially developed as a final project for Computational Photography at Brown University with Kelvin Jiang, Hannah Zhang, and Arin Idhant.

Thank You For Coming/I Love You/Can I Keep You?, image 2
Thank You For Coming/I Love You/Can I Keep You?, image 3
Thank You For Coming/I Love You/Can I Keep You?, image 4

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