Juxtaposing failed or blemished instances of surveillance with private voicemails, this piece aims to showcase the inherent publicity and scale of surveillance technology. Voices and people allude to narrative elements but the scenes are all instances of disfigured surveillance. With a theatrical set up, corresponding voices to visuals, this work pieces together an intimate and raw narrative.

All video footage is from surveillance footage found on insecam.org.

2020

Can’t See Eye.

We’ve grown accustomed to accustomed to technological view portals. While webcams and other camera based digital tools are seamlessly integrated into our lives, these vantage points are not characteristic of human sight. How does the perspective and angle of camera devices (webcam, screen share, tripod) affect the audience’s experience? when do we feel like we are prying or spying? When do we become conscious of the machine interface controlling and morphing our human sight?

Through this lens, this performance explores the qualities of digital and physical images and how displacing a media from its original space affects its reception. Hito Steyerl’s work “In Defense of the Poor Image” describes and argues against the classist views on low resolution images traditionally being considered low quality. In this experimental piece, we explore the narrative of a low resolution high value image through transformations between physical and digital form.

2020

Under the pandemic’s stay at home directives, we have largely relied on videos call technology to perform our daily functions. However, as a side effect, these technologies expose private life and allow us to clinically enter the living spaces of others.

This echoes the words of Laura Speigel in her piece “The Suburban Home Companion” where she writes that television allowed for “antiseptic electrical spaces” in the 1950s, in which families could view oppositional realities without being tainted by their actual social context. She further argues that televisions ability to merge private and public spaces made it the dieal companion for suburban homes in the post WWII era.

While the conditions of this period and our current one are extremely different, there is an evident parallel between the two in how camera-based technologies blur the lines between public and private spaces. Juxtaposing a sterile and distant tone with intimately ordinary scene, I sue webcam footage to reframe quotidien video calls to focus beyond the individual into the space that the occupy.

2020