This project was a participatory experiment performed once in 2004 at the Hostel Haus Salon in Williamsburg, curated by Leejone Wong. It was an homage of sorts to Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975), updated to focus on the cultural ubiquity of surveillance and self-broadcasting.
The artist stands in the center of a group of people. A micro-camera is on the artist’s forehead, and his “point of view” is projected on a screen behind him, in view of the audience/participants. For exactly three (3) minutes each, in total silence, the artist maintains forced eye contact with every participant in turn. The others are free to look at the artist, or the participant who is looking at the artist, or the screen showing how the artist sees that participant looking back, or even at the others to look at how they are looking. When the interval is over, the artist turns to view the next person, and the former participant becomes part of the audience once again.
While the audience cycles between the different viewpoints, necessarily forced not only into the role of the viewer, but of the voyeur. The looming presence of the projected image constantly threatens the act of looking itself. It is difficult to look away from the screen, even for those weaned on constant video imagery. The nature of spectacle is such that, even when simultaneous, it seems more real than reality. Only the artist and the current participant are experiencing direct contact. The onset and fade of self-consciousness is broadcast for all to see. Amidst the layered panoply of surveillance, each three minute interval becomes a meditiative exercise in genuine, non-mediated, communication.
Note: no documentation of this piece survives, only the concept illustration remains. A re-staging is planned in 2012.
