Amrita Hepi
Scripture for a smokescreen episode 3: The invisible hand

Sousveillance is the recording of an activity by a member of the public, rather than a person or organisation in authority, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.

The term, “sousveillance” denotes bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically, by mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings, or hierarchically – ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or agencies.

Taking methods of sousveillance Amrita shoots first person video footage from a body cam across three places of trade:

• A temple exchanging cash for blessings
• A dance studio learning the techniques for earning tips
• A trade of currency

Each short vignette highlights the interplay between personal power and market dynamics.

By proposing the rhetorical questions: Does the market/capital see us? And, in turn, how does this make us see ourselves? Amrita’s installation hones our attention to our hands—as both an embodied expression of an 18th-century metaphor and the very mechanisms by which we, the human participants, enact within these markets.

While we verbally attempt to renounce responsibility for the markets’ actions, Amrita wonders if these unseeable forces are not our hands – hands which, minute by minute, handle our technologies to interact with the digital world through. Are we as entangled within these markets as any abstracted, non-human otherness?

How many hands, real and imagined, spiritual and political, shape the forces that are the Market?

Credits

Artist: Amtrita Hepi

An Experimenta Commission

Curator’s note

The term’ invisible hand’, coined by pioneering economist and philosopher Adam Smith in 1759, remains relevant as a metaphor some 250 years later. The term alludes to a force beyond human comprehension that influences and directs economic markets.

While this term has been subject to various interpretations, the sense of forces bigger than us playing/controlling the Markets continues to have currency. Maybe even more so in a time of rapidly emerging digital and AI-enabled trading markets.