Mayte Gómez Molina

Some leaf bugs look so much like leaves that they get eaten by their peers

Fall Semester 2024

This project investigates how visibility and invisibility shape our relationship with our surroundings, using camouflage as a metaphor for navigating complex social, emotional, and physical environments. It explores the paradox of "hiding in plain sight," where people balance a desire for recognition with the fear of exposure. The project aims to expand literary creation through digital media, using non-conventional storytelling techniques to explore the kaleidoscopic phenomena of our desire to be seen and our simultaneous desire to remain out of sight.

To capture this, the research unfolds in a triptych format: a novel, a video essay, and a video game. The three elements will put together elements from natural and social sciences, Internet phenomena, non-human intelligence and biographical experiences to try to create scientific hypotheses through the filter of personal experience, following the theoretical frame of situated knowledge, after thinkers and artists such as Donna Haraway or Ursula K. Le Guin.

This tensión born out of the desire to be seen and remain hidden is relevant both personally—such as in relationships and self-identity—and in today’s digital landscapes, like social media and online interactions, where people constantly curate what they reveal or conceal to their peers as well as they do so with the technological and power structures that mediate our communication and visibility desires in our current times. The main focus of the project is to poetically discuss how individuals and social groups that are more prone to violence and discrimination navigate the duality of fighting for recognition while being aware that being seen also results in a deeper vulnerability and a threat of more control.