Sense: 001
Cielo Saucedo
Sept 2025
3027 S Grand Ave
Los Angeles, CA
With performances by Christal Perez, Emir West, and Vivian Buenrostro.
Exhibition text by Akhil Srivastava.
The gun going off
The random back fire….. appears as random as asking
—Erica Hunt, “Mourning Birds”
What if we built a force field? asked then 24-year-old Palmer Luckey and 33-year-old Trae Stephens of the US-Mexico Border in 2016. This, to be clear, was to ask: How can we send more forces to the field? Of course, this is a very old question. See, the latter formulation brings to light that there is an ongoing war between forces and the field. The task for Luckey and Stephens, then, is to defeat the field. They must make the field incapacitated.
It seems, however, that the ancient field is somehow always pregnant. Even when reduced to rubble, genocided, something remains and regenerates–children are willed. Luckey and Stephens, founder of Oculus and Partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund respectively, realized that they needed to democratize their despotism to meet this perennial pregnancy of the field. The children of the fields, fieldhands, needed to be invited to the lab. So the fieldhands became Border Patrol Agents. In 2017, Luckey and Stephens inaugurated Anduril Industries, military contractor vying for dominion de jure of a Southern force field, above this very integration. Between the ambits of 32-foot surveillance towers, Anduril invites fieldhands to step under virtual reality (VR) headsets for the production of hundreds more fields of vision to complete its generalism. The children of the field are turned into the field’s overseers. They catch aberrations in the field, like siblings traversing the field. Coaxed from their guerilla neighborhoods, fieldhands stand under their headsets and fragment the field. They transform the field into bits, tearing the field. Mother and child are therefore pulled apart, nigh blotting, to take Frederick Douglass’ language, the fact of the relationship from memory.
The headset is a whirlwind. At first, the fieldhand is decapitated. The device encumbers her head, replacing everything vital in its scope. Green captions produce a new vestibular system, of both balance and culture. The fieldhand now wades in a virtual valley. PERSON 98%, it tells her when she looks down at the glowing square which has replaced her feet. She is no longer mobile, no longer political–there is nothing to be done. No way to avoid the tear.
An ox weighs on her tongue, the fieldhand. There is nothing to be done. She waits for a fire to light up the darkness which has suddenly washed the field. Somebody save her! The child’s superior is perched on her cheeks so she cannot close her eyes up tight…and sleep. There is no spectatorial sovereignty as long as the eyes above her eyes, the third eyes, remind her that she is always being watched and watching. Slowly, the headset unearths everything that was once familiar, every bit of the field. The fieldhand sees her mother exposed before her, and she is destroyed. Somehow, yet, there is still a voice churning through the flat desert winds. The child eventually finds her mother’s cadence and unites with her in whispering: “I’ve only got words for those in the know, / for the others, I can’t remember anything.”
- Akhil Srivastava
Works
1. Field, 2025
Cardboard VR headset from Northrop Grumman, mom’s kitchen knife, horse hair.
2. System II (sound), 2025
Shooting target hardware, drivers, wires, solder, wood, amps, chairs, mouse, 4 button key board, zip ties.
3. Sword of Damocles NOTHING POWER, 2024
3D printed Maseca, self tanner, paper pulp, lamictal, steel, obj of c, knives confiscated by the TSA.
4. If I twist up my fist and take away a sliver will it all come down?, 2023-2025
Artist frame, photographs, wires from echo park fence.
5. SENSE 001: Data Haunt, 2021-2024
3 level video game. Researchers: D.A. Gonzalez + Christal Perez. Sound by Jazzy Romero.
6. Every single thing in the world is surrounded by a fog of virtual images (silent hill), 2025.
Fog machine, fog juice.
7. Under the knife, 2025
Banners.
About the Artist
Cielo Saucedo (b. 1993, Whittier, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is an access worker and artist from a family of migrant farm workers. They focus on the dispersal of ableism through cultural economies. They work to dissolve the curative aspirations of technology. Their practice encompasses writing, computer generated imagery, sculpture, machine vision and virtual reality. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago in 2020, and their MFA at University of California, Los Angeles in 2024. They are currently an Eyebeam Democracy Fellow (2024). Recent exhibitions of their work include presentations at The Armory, Pasadena for Getty PST (2024), Francios Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024), Murmurs, Los Angeles (2024), BlankSpace, Pittsburgh (2023), New Image Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2024), MexiCali Biennale, The Cheech at the Riverside Museum (2023), Human Resources, Los Angeles (2022) Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago (2021) and Rudimiento, Quito (2021). They have given panels and lectures at NYU, UPenn, the Whitney Independent Study Program, Indiana State University, and the Sandberg Instituut, among other institutions.
The gun going offThe random back fire….. appears as random as asking
—Erica Hunt, “Mourning Birds”
What if we built a force field? asked then 24-year-old Palmer Luckey and 33-year-old Trae Stephens of the US-Mexico Border in 2016. This, to be clear, was to ask: How can we send more forces to the field? Of course, this is a very old question. See, the latter formulation brings to light that there is an ongoing war between forces and the field. The task for Luckey and Stephens, then, is to defeat the field. They must make the field incapacitated.
It seems, however, that the ancient field is somehow always pregnant. Even when reduced to rubble, genocided, something remains and regenerates–children are willed. Luckey and Stephens, founder of Oculus and Partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund respectively, realized that they needed to democratize their despotism to meet this perennial pregnancy of the field. The children of the fields, fieldhands, needed to be invited to the lab. So the fieldhands became Border Patrol Agents. In 2017, Luckey and Stephens inaugurated Anduril Industries, military contractor vying for dominion de jure of a Southern force field, above this very integration. Between the ambits of 32-foot surveillance towers, Anduril invites fieldhands to step under virtual reality (VR) headsets for the production of hundreds more fields of vision to complete its generalism. The children of the field are turned into the field’s overseers. They catch aberrations in the field, like siblings traversing the field. Coaxed from their guerilla neighborhoods, fieldhands stand under their headsets and fragment the field. They transform the field into bits, tearing the field. Mother and child are therefore pulled apart, nigh blotting, to take Frederick Douglass’ language, the fact of the relationship from memory.
The headset is a whirlwind. At first, the fieldhand is decapitated. The device encumbers her head, replacing everything vital in its scope. Green captions produce a new vestibular system, of both balance and culture. The fieldhand now wades in a virtual valley. PERSON 98%, it tells her when she looks down at the glowing square which has replaced her feet. She is no longer mobile, no longer political–there is nothing to be done. No way to avoid the tear.
An ox weighs on her tongue, the fieldhand. There is nothing to be done. She waits for a fire to light up the darkness which has suddenly washed the field. Somebody save her! The child’s superior is perched on her cheeks so she cannot close her eyes up tight…and sleep. There is no spectatorial sovereignty as long as the eyes above her eyes, the third eyes, remind her that she is always being watched and watching. Slowly, the headset unearths everything that was once familiar, every bit of the field. The fieldhand sees her mother exposed before her, and she is destroyed. Somehow, yet, there is still a voice churning through the flat desert winds. The child eventually finds her mother’s cadence and unites with her in whispering: “I’ve only got words for those in the know, / for the others, I can’t remember anything.”
- Akhil Srivastava
Works
1. Field, 2025
Cardboard VR headset from Northrop Grumman, mom’s kitchen knife, horse hair.
2. System II (sound), 2025
Shooting target hardware, drivers, wires, solder, wood, amps, chairs, mouse, 4 button key board, zip ties.
3. Sword of Damocles NOTHING POWER, 2024
3D printed Maseca, self tanner, paper pulp, lamictal, steel, obj of c, knives confiscated by the TSA.
4. If I twist up my fist and take away a sliver will it all come down?, 2023-2025
Artist frame, photographs, wires from echo park fence.
5. SENSE 001: Data Haunt, 2021-2024
3 level video game. Researchers: D.A. Gonzalez + Christal Perez. Sound by Jazzy Romero.
6. Every single thing in the world is surrounded by a fog of virtual images (silent hill), 2025.
Fog machine, fog juice.
7. Under the knife, 2025
Banners.
About the Artist
Cielo Saucedo (b. 1993, Whittier, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is an access worker and artist from a family of migrant farm workers. They focus on the dispersal of ableism through cultural economies. They work to dissolve the curative aspirations of technology. Their practice encompasses writing, computer generated imagery, sculpture, machine vision and virtual reality. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago in 2020, and their MFA at University of California, Los Angeles in 2024. They are currently an Eyebeam Democracy Fellow (2024). Recent exhibitions of their work include presentations at The Armory, Pasadena for Getty PST (2024), Francios Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2024), Murmurs, Los Angeles (2024), BlankSpace, Pittsburgh (2023), New Image Gallery, Los Angeles (2023), Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2024), MexiCali Biennale, The Cheech at the Riverside Museum (2023), Human Resources, Los Angeles (2022) Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago (2021) and Rudimiento, Quito (2021). They have given panels and lectures at NYU, UPenn, the Whitney Independent Study Program, Indiana State University, and the Sandberg Instituut, among other institutions.