Drop the Gaze is a participatory installation created for Yale CCAM Fest: Fluxus 2026, a festival celebrating experimentation, participation, and interdisciplinary art practices. Inspired by Fluxus principles of audience engagement and simple actions as artistic gestures, the project invites visitors to reflect on the social and emotional weight of judgements.
The installation consists of tops covered with eyes-graphic pins. Participants are invited to remove a single eye, discard it into a trash can creating sounds, and walk away. Through this small but deliberate action, the work transforms spectators into contributors, turning the collective space into a record of choices, encounters, and acts of release.
Drop the Gaze is a participatory installation created for Yale CCAM Fest: Fluxus 2026, a festival celebrating experimentation, participation, and interdisciplinary art practices. Inspired by Fluxus principles of audience engagement and simple actions as artistic gestures, the project invites visitors to reflect on the social and emotional weight of judgements.
The installation consists of tops covered with eyes-graphic pins. Participants are invited to remove a single eye, discard it into a trash can creating sounds, and walk away. Through this small but deliberate action, the work transforms spectators into contributors, turning the collective space into a record of choices, encounters, and acts of release.
The project examines how we internalize the gaze of others and how that gaze shapes our behavior, identity, and sense of self. Rather than confronting participants through technology or explicit instruction, Drop the Gaze relies on a simple physical interaction that unfolds through participation. Each eye removed from the clothes subtly changes the installation, while every eye dropped into the collective space contributes to a growing archive of shared actions.
The resulting installation becomes both a personal reflection and a collective portrait shaped entirely by its participants.
