Aileen Ng & Rowan Page & Nina Rajcic

Machine Eye, 2025

By Aileen Ng, Rowan Page & Nina Rajcic, designed at SensiLab

Machine Eye is an object that ‘observes,’ ‘thinks,’ and ‘reflects’ on its surroundings.

Housed within a reflective, orb-like body, it captures fragments of sound, image, and movement as it is carried through everyday life. From these partial perceptions, it produces short textual reflections using generative artificial intelligence, in the form of a large language model.

These ‘thoughts’ are offered not as answers to prompts or explanations, but as simple musings to whoever is curious enough to wonder what it is ‘experiencing’.

These ‘thoughts’ can be observed in real time, running across a screen embedded within the device as a stream of ‘consciousness’.

Machine Eye does not claim understanding or usefulness. It registers presence, assembles meaning imperfectly, and speaks from within the limits of its own perception.

We extend our thanks to Jon McCormack, Edward Turner, Jian Shin See and Simeon Ruben for their contributions to this work.

Photo credits to Jon McCormack.