Black Hole
“Black Hole” is a wall-mounted concave spiral made with a single continuous line of white light embedded within a black tubular diffuser, with a panoptic surveillance camera positioned at its centre. The piece displays a continuous vortex of light being absorbed into the black camera dome, intermittently revealing the portraits of viewers looking at the work before drawing them into the flow.
Shaped like a satellite dish to evoke directional tuning, the central camera dome recalls cinematic cyclopes such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The spiral itself is an ancient figure of accumulation and collapse: matter drawn inward, energy concentrated toward a vanishing point. Here, that point is an industrial camera equipped with face-detection algorithms that register and incorporate viewers into the vortex. Unlike surveillance systems that archive and police everyday life, “Black Hole” continuously erases the information it gathers as each portrait disappears into the spiral. The work thus stages both a memento mori and an anti-metric gesture: a visualization of disappearance rather than retention.
To look at “Black Hole” is also to be looked at—catalogued, measured, and returned to a system that can recognize only what it has been trained to see. The facial analysis at its core carries the accumulated biases of training data, the blind spots of its designers, and the political economy of its deployment. What the camera captures is never simply a viewer, but a subject filtered through layers of computational interpretation. In this sense, “Black Hole” extends a lineage running from TV Buddha by Nam June Paik—where a sculpture watches its own live image in an ouroboros of analog vision—through the computational turn that transformed the mise en abyme into something no longer frictionless. Where early CCTV artworks often staged an endless regression of watching and being watched, “Black Hole” introduces the recursive logic of contemporary machine vision: the artwork analyzes the observer who analyzes the artwork, and neither emerges unchanged.
Shaped like a satellite dish to evoke directional tuning, the central camera dome recalls cinematic cyclopes such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The spiral itself is an ancient figure of accumulation and collapse: matter drawn inward, energy concentrated toward a vanishing point. Here, that point is an industrial camera equipped with face-detection algorithms that register and incorporate viewers into the vortex. Unlike surveillance systems that archive and police everyday life, “Black Hole” continuously erases the information it gathers as each portrait disappears into the spiral. The work thus stages both a memento mori and an anti-metric gesture: a visualization of disappearance rather than retention.
To look at “Black Hole” is also to be looked at—catalogued, measured, and returned to a system that can recognize only what it has been trained to see. The facial analysis at its core carries the accumulated biases of training data, the blind spots of its designers, and the political economy of its deployment. What the camera captures is never simply a viewer, but a subject filtered through layers of computational interpretation. In this sense, “Black Hole” extends a lineage running from TV Buddha by Nam June Paik—where a sculpture watches its own live image in an ouroboros of analog vision—through the computational turn that transformed the mise en abyme into something no longer frictionless. Where early CCTV artworks often staged an endless regression of watching and being watched, “Black Hole” introduces the recursive logic of contemporary machine vision: the artwork analyzes the observer who analyzes the artwork, and neither emerges unchanged.
General info
Spanish name:
Hoyo Negro
Year of creation:
2026
Technique:
Computer, 153.7 metres of LED lights (14,755 LED bulbs), panoramic surveillance camera, custom diffuser, metal support, coded in OpenFrameworks, Python and TouchDesigner.
Power:
110-240V
2,000W
2,000W
Room conditions:
The piece requires internet access and is hung on the wall using its 15 radial aluminium braces.
Dimensions:
220cm diameter
Weight:
~65kg (35kg in linear lights, 30kgs in electronics and metal)
Edition:
3 Editions, 1 AP
Exhibitions
- Zero 10, Co-presented by bitforms gallery and Galería Max Estrella, Zero 10 by Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2026.
Credits
- Software: Hugo Daoust, David Robert
- Hardware: Sebastien Dallaire, William Sutton, Stephan Schulz
- Production: Sebastien Dallaire, William Sutton, Stephan Schulz, Hugo Daoust, Emily Green
Photo Library (click to expand)
2026 - Antimodular Studio, Montréal, Canada
