Monitoring desire

Abstract

My thesis project consists of producing and wearing a system of self-surveillance that has been subversively inserted into an already existing informational and electronic system. By bringing surveillance technology closer in and attaching it to the body, I have been able to personalize a form of technological mirroring through which subjectivity and the body are reconstructed. Inside the field of view of this reconfigured vision, the wearer/user is open to create and explore the erotic formation of fluid identities and their potential transgressive relationships. Monitoring Desire was a performance at Harvard University's Science Center that, through a guerrilla act of appropriation, captured the image on the Center's informational monitor. The act of capture was performed by two women and took place within and between the Center's first floor and lower level lobbies. Components utilized within the performance consisted of a high-heeled shoe with a built-in surveillance camera and transmitter, the Center's informational monitor, and the monitor's remote control device. The image produced by the camera on the shoe assimilated an abstracted view up the wearer's skirt with the surrounding architecture. This image was transmitted from the wearer downstairs to the second performer upstairs by way of the Science Center's informational monitor. The real-time video image mediated communication between both the performers and the spectators located on the separate floor levels. In the course of this performance, our bodies, as reconfigured through our surveillance apparatus, came to effect our subjectivities as they were presented in public space. Through the act of hijacking the informational monitor, we performed our power to publicly re-present ourselves back into the space in which we were occupying.