His latest interactive artwork, Here’s how I did not see what you wanted me to see (2022), intends to produce a journey to bring “customer awareness” to users whose traces on social media are sold to governments to predict behaviour and sell products.

Attard specifically targets TikTok to explore the way one of the newest and most successful social platforms unpacks and abuses the mechanisms of vision.

In the technocratic digital society, TikTok holds a special place because it attracts an array of subcultures from all over the world.

It is a fast-growing platform, and users do not seem to mind that the algorithm openly rules the platform and its content.

Attard’s so-called “artistic sabotage” of TikTok is an attempt to steal the technology from the market. To do so, he employs an eye tracker, one of many technologies used today for biometric surveillance to capitalise on our visual attention.

Not too many individuals are familiar with it or use it for personal entertainment, yet the eye tracker is still quite widespread in gaming, big data and social media.

Attard applies his interest in the eye tracker to rethink drawing in the 21st century as a somehow impure hybridisation of human and machine which challenges the notions of authorship and style in art.

These ideas have been the bastions of art history for centuries, yet atomisation and digitalisation have opened up opportunities in every field of human action, and culture is no exception.

Besides inspiring new processes, they are also questioning the borders between digital content, a startling visual object, and art itself.

On Blitz Valletta’s website, Attard invites the users to experience a deconstructed exhibition – to see, read, and follow.

Each possibility, identified by a button, corresponds to an alternative journey into the artist’s process – even the backstage – as if Attard wanted to leave nothing untold in an “I post, therefore I am” world, to update René Descartes’s principle.

While the seeing and reading experiences immediately launch on an opening day, the “follow” – a curated feed of eye content and challenges found by the artist during his Tik Tok safaris – grows over time.

Also, another button flashes up during the exhibition, under the name “big data”, referencing the material collected by the artist.

Ultimately, in Here’s how I did not see what you wanted me to see (2022), Attard exposes the invisible power game played at the expense of the user and creates a portal to a new market with art products of tech-culture available to all, and thus of no economic value.

Attard’s practice investigates images as social and cultural constructs. His interest in the mechanisms of vision – its perceptual, physiological and neurophysiological dimensions – is the focus of his practice-based PhD research at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, funded by the Malta Arts Scholarship scheme.

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