Jiwon Lee: Ellie’s Eye examines the desire to see beyond the limits set by physical abilities and tracks down its manifestations; animals’ visual fields adapting to their need to hunt or avoid being hunted, see-through technologies using x-rays or wireless signals, and therapies that aim to chart out the secrets of the mind. What motivated you to make a work about the mind that revolves around the act of seeing?

Jeamin Cha: While researching the history of scanning, I came to learn the recent development of technologies that enable us to see beyond the seen. Counseling has become a method for medical treatments and the invisible mind has become an object that we can “see-through,” which felt like a certain tipping point. Our time never leaves anything unknown or invisible; no stone unturned, nowhere to hide. If a physical matter is broken, we can mend it or destroy it without a trace. But it’s not the same with the mind or spirit, it is a different kind of space. Of course, scanning technology is beneficial and necessary to human wellbeing. However, there is a realm that goes beyond human conquest, or at least there should be. As technology develops, I’m more interested in preserving and expanding the space for unknown, unintelligible things. Ellie’s Eye was a way for me to question whether humans can consciously choose to live in austerity and to leave certain areas unknown, and if so, which areas will remain untouched.

JiL: Ellie, an AI therapist with a human-like avatar, seems to look into the eyes of the client, but when the client goes beyond the programmed angle, her eye involuntarily twitches. Your chat conversation with an AI therapist, published in the catalogue of the exhibition “Jeamin Cha, Troubleshooting Mind I, II, III,” held at Kadist in San Francisco last Fall, is also awkward and superficial compared to real life counseling. It seems like you’re intrigued by these clumsy moments of technology.

JC: The title Ellie’s Eye comes from that scene where Ellie’s eye twitches and reveals the limit of her viewing angle. AI therapists or chatbots are mostly yet to be commercialized, and even if they are, the conversations with them are still quite clunky. The current technologies don’t necessarily aim to substitute human therapists, but rather to supplement them for cost efficiency and 24/7 accessibility. The awkwardness, however, will improve sooner or later. I feel that these elaborate technologies will distract us from the essential question—why do more and more people suffer from depression and require mental therapy? We’re now one step away from the full development of AI counseling technology and technological colonization of the mind, at a point where some parts of the technology still seem a bit ridiculous; I think now is the time to ask these questions.

JiL: A series of closeup photos of dogs’ eyes appear twice in the video. In the second round, the eyes are rendered abstract, looking like small universes. This is also the final image in the video. 

JC: When I received the medical photographs from a veterinarian, all the files were named after the actual names of the dogs but one, which I named “Ellie.” The first round of photos captures the visible surface of dogs’ eyes and appears with their names. The second part is ultrasound images and there are no names here. In comparison, the images are either with names or nameless, and either of the surface or beneath. In fact, the ultrasound scans look like planets in space, captivating and terrifying at once.

Several questions led me to include the names of the dogs in the video. Two dogs were shot in live action for Ellie’s Eye, both companion dogs belonging to the Kadist team workers. This made me think about the difference between dogs that you can call by their name and dogs you can’t. What does it mean when an AI can call a person by their name? When we call an AI by its name, does it force us to be otherized or internalized? These were some of the questions I asked myself.

JiL: Unlike your previous works, in which you preferred to either stage and capture a certain scene or document a real-life event, Ellie’s Eye mainly relies on researched images. In line with this, texts with footnotes form the main backbone of the video. I’m curious about what made you try this new production method, and how it changed your approach to creating the work. 

JC: It is indeed the first time that I’ve incorporated found footage in my work. I guess we can call it a “scrapbook,” a video that fully reveals the research process. I sometimes felt weighed down by the process of filming in order to obtain an image. Production requires a certain degree of professionality, but professionality in turn doesn’t produce art. I wanted to try a different way of work making which can open up and form a certain process, rather than obsessing about producing an unflawed outcome.

An opportunity to do an overseas residency, at Kadist, came up, and I have to say it wasn’t easy to conduct research outside the context that I was used to. I mostly used emails to converse to people who could provide research materials. I was able to get a lot of text and image references this way, also with the help of Kadist. The letters and text references became the main material of the work, so naturally text became an important element in it. Completing Ellie’s Eye gave me the confidence to work in ways that were unfamiliar to me. Production methods can be changed, in sync with the issues that are being dealt with. The scale and method of a production is something that can’t be disregarded, but at the same time, it’s nothing that critical.

Jooyeon Lee: Your previous work, Sound Garden (2019), features an interview with a counsellor who has a dilemma concerning a hired company that wants to restore the workers’ minds, as if they could fix their broken parts. In the desire to see through and manage the human mind, there is underlying capitalism. I would like to know your thoughts on this.

JC: Sound Garden follows the transportation of cultivated trees with the voice-over of four counsellors: one hired by a private corporation, one working at a college, one volunteering for activists, and one at a women’s support center. What interested me was the relationship between capitalism and “care.” A counsellor’s role can be contradictory, while it helps people to recover from the wounds inflicted by capitalism, it also encourages them to return and accommodate to capitalism. Acts that fall into the category of “care,” such as counseling, cultivating, training, and treating, tend to circulate the common misbelief that adapting to neoliberalism is more a matter of practicality and survival than a matter of politics. Capitalist realism monopolizes truth and restrains imagination. Sound Garden was, in a way, an effort to find words and images that convey this desperate feeling where you can’t even imagine alternatives.

JoL: In Ellie’s Eyes, AI counsellor ELLIE takes the female name and looks like a lovely young woman. Caring for others, especially their minds, has often been referred to as feminine labor. What do you conceive AI counsellors’ in feminine forms, as many other AIs and robots in the form of women?

JC: Women have been exploited as caring laborers. It reflects the patriarchal culture of forcing caring labor only on women. In fact, I think it's more important how a woman's appearance or speech is reproduced than the gender issue of avatars. There are many designs made with male-centered eyes, such as slender body shape, red lips color, small mouth, and soft tone, etc. However, there are counselors of various genders and I think they play an important role (at least in Korea).

JoL: Dogs are generally regarded as human friends. But in Ellie’s Eye, you explore this relationship further. In the last scene, an anecdote by Donna Haraway reminds us of our desire to view dogs as subalterns of humans, creatures that can never become independent. What are your thoughts on human’s relationships to other animals?

JC: Ellie’s Eye ends with a quote from Donna Haraway, and while editing, I thought that the link between this sentence and the other parts of the work may seem less comprehensible. The reason that I chose this sentence—“I fear [...] misidentification of the important fact I wanted dogs, not babies”—is not because it sums up the main ideas of The Companion Species Manifesto, but because of the word “fear.” With wit and humor, it reminds us of what we should really fear; we should fear the urge to erase fear entirely, and Ellie’s Eye was a series of cross-questions arriving at this conclusion.

JoL: Ellie’s Eye is an essay film composed of stories about seeing. These stories are organically connected with the found footage—which reminds of The Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988) by Harun Farocki. I wonder what other films have impacted this “scrapbook” film production and how it will affect the future films of yours?

JC: One interesting coincidence is that Ellie’s developer, Dr. Skip Rizzo, actually made an appearance in Harun Farocki’s Serious Games III: Immersion. Dr. Rizzo has dedicated many years to researching VR technology for psychotherapy purposes. Farocki explains the technology that reduces PTSD of military soldiers. Of course, I didn’t know this before contacting Dr. Rizzo, nor did he tell me this. I just thought that his email profile photo looked extremely familiar. After a couple of months, while I was having my morning coffee, I suddenly remembered that he is the person in the work. Someday, maybe I will come to realize how Farocki effected my work. To be honest, I think you get to understand your own work only in hindsight, and by the skin of your teeth. Perhaps I will make more essay-type films, I can’t tell. But I do hope to keep making work in a steady pace for a long time, like Farocki did until he passed away.