The Found Life of a Paranoid Voyeur has become an almost obsessive intrigue into the world that emanates from the found, in which information is half present and half absent, and thus inherently phantom-like or uncanny. I like to think if you pause for a second, you can imagine a story behind each uncanny image, and a whole epic narrative when they’re grouped together. The interdependence of the real and the imaginary created within the viewers mind, implies a kind of ever-present déjà vu. The very pervasiveness of this quality can in fact render its visual elements insensible.

The uncanny lurks in every dark recess of the online world, passed around in group chats, social media, and amidst the digital margins. Their sources and participants are unknown and unknowable—circulated oddments of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another—car crash viewing with the visceral cocktail of unease, horror, repulsion and bewilderment. Freud called it ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.

Each element of this film is unearthed from the ground of back-alley archives. The substance, the ingredient, the actual and valuable material of this piece, is its uncanny found nature. It represents a larger body of human utterances, consciously drawn from a sea of millions of other sources. What you’re left with is an eerie sense, that perhaps one shouldn’t have stumbled across the footage at all.

This collection of pieces also raises issues of who has access to, and a say in, the use of our data and footage- posing questions about the human condition in the digital age. As these technologies and processes become more rooted in our daily lives, the rise of the uncanny feeling as a daily experience, as part and parcel of an anxiety-consumer culture, becomes ever present and undeniably contemporary.