CINEMATIC
LANDSCAPE
EXCHANGE
Title: Reciprocal Gaze
Name: Yuxin (Alex) Liu
Voiceover: Yuxin (Alex) Liu
The Headquarters of White Sands Missile Range sits within the public landscape of New Mexico yet remains entirely detached from it. The road closes during missile tests. Otherwise, there is nothing to see.
This project asks what it means to be given access, and what remains hidden within that act of allowance. The proposal brings Highway 70 into the heart of the White Sands Main Post Area, using its passage as a controlled form of public oversight through exposure and proximity.
Inside the town, one is embedded rather than informed. Movement is permitted; understanding is withheld. Everything happens too quickly, and from too close a position, to read the totality of what surrounds you. Proximity forecloses the view it promises. To move far away is to gain legibility. The system resolves into infrastructure, into territory, into an organised mechanism visible from altitude. But from that distance, specificity dissolves. Both positions reveal something true. Neither offers complete visibility.
This duality is the operating condition of military space. Such systems persist through the structural management of position: where a body may stand, how long it may remain, and from which angle it is allowed to look. Spatial control therefore becomes a form of institutional control. Accountability remains internal, while the actions that take place within remain inaccessible to those outside. The resulting blur is not accidental; it is structural.
What this project attempts to do is to puncture that condition slightly, to create a small opening within a system that usually resists scrutiny.
Name: Yuxin (Alex) Liu
Voiceover: Yuxin (Alex) Liu
The Headquarters of White Sands Missile Range sits within the public landscape of New Mexico yet remains entirely detached from it. The road closes during missile tests. Otherwise, there is nothing to see.
This project asks what it means to be given access, and what remains hidden within that act of allowance. The proposal brings Highway 70 into the heart of the White Sands Main Post Area, using its passage as a controlled form of public oversight through exposure and proximity.
Inside the town, one is embedded rather than informed. Movement is permitted; understanding is withheld. Everything happens too quickly, and from too close a position, to read the totality of what surrounds you. Proximity forecloses the view it promises. To move far away is to gain legibility. The system resolves into infrastructure, into territory, into an organised mechanism visible from altitude. But from that distance, specificity dissolves. Both positions reveal something true. Neither offers complete visibility.
This duality is the operating condition of military space. Such systems persist through the structural management of position: where a body may stand, how long it may remain, and from which angle it is allowed to look. Spatial control therefore becomes a form of institutional control. Accountability remains internal, while the actions that take place within remain inaccessible to those outside. The resulting blur is not accidental; it is structural.
What this project attempts to do is to puncture that condition slightly, to create a small opening within a system that usually resists scrutiny.
