Each Apparition, Searches for an Eye presents a series of 100 photo-portraits of soldiers from the artists deployment into combat training for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Instructed to obscure all identifying features to elude enemy facial-recognition software, the resultant erasures into her film negatives recall 19th Century ‘spirit photography’: whereby daguerreotypists experimented with emergent long-exposure technology to capture ghosts onto silver plates.

Critically, the daguerrotype’s unprecedented visual fidelity also produced the first photo-portraits of soldiers, as well as the first photograph of an active battlefield: a road littered with cannon-balls in Sevastopol, Ukraine taken during The Crimean War in 1855.

This erasure onto film negatives to allow a public record, means committing facial expressions and identity markers solely to the private memory of the artist: which must be further made in anticipation of how region-based convolutional neural networks may evolve in sophistication in the near-future. In this gesture, it is to both simultaneously attempt bypass and freely catapult the frames into the murky, perma-speculative realm of 21st Century ‘operational images’.

The following photo-sculptural installation interrogates how the fundamental phenomenologies of a photograph remain, its components simply re-arranged in a different order; the unseen eye behind a lens, the passport-size portrait untouchable under glass, the information veiled behind a curtain, the hardware plate, the migration of the captured image – be it through a portable frame or a fibre-optic cable, and the process of sensitisation, by which the more exposure time to a subject’s face still means a greater clarity.

Curiously, the same facial recognition technology is now being used to identify previously un- named sitters of these earliest 19th Century soldier portraits, matching facial structures against wider data-sets of historical photographs and archives.

Each Apparition, Searches for an Eye proposes that the central question of our bio- technological relationship may not be simply one of Turing’s sentient ‘ghost in the machine’, but rather of the necessity to become a ‘ghost to the machine’: a phenomenon already embodied by recent frontline legends such as the Ghost of Kyiv.

An elusive apparition for another ghost; one which first searches for an eye to be seen, an eye to be localised, classified, mapped to a wider face, and verified.