See Without Being Seen examines how image-making technologies have shaped the representation, surveillance, and dehumanization of Iraqi and Arab subjects. Structured in five chapters, the video moves through archival film, documentary fragments, popular media, gaming aesthetics, and drone imagery to trace how looking becomes a form of power.

The opening chapter, “Birdwatching,” features early historical film footage in which the filmed subject looks back at the camera. This reversal unsettles the Orientalist gaze, exposing how the camera has often framed Iraqi and Arab bodies as exotic, foreign, and available for study. Across the video, appropriated footage is repeated, patterned, and recontextualized, revealing continuities between colonial looking, media stereotype, entertainment culture, and contemporary digital circulation.

The work ends with drones entering the frame, shifting from the historical camera to remote vertical warfare. Here, birdwatching becomes an unstable metaphor for the aerial technologies that watch, target, and produce images from a distance. See Without Being Seen links the archive of representation to the contemporary image systems through which violence is witnessed, consumed, and abstracted.