Giving surveillance a visual language

Kate Devlin’s essay explores how surveillance has become embedded in everyday life, from CCTV and facial recognition to the technologies we willingly invite into our homes. It raises questions about privacy, freedom and our own participation in the systems that monitor us.

Drawing inspiration from propaganda art and postmodernism, I developed a distinctive visual style using AI animation, combining bold colours, graphic compositions and distorted imagery to reflect the authoritarian themes running through the piece.

The approach allowed me to connect the essay’s different forms of surveillance through a consistent visual language, turning familiar technologies into unsettling symbols of observation and control.