Gaze Watch Parties
Critical Art Studies on The Body
Mixed Media Installation and Interactive Performance
Erika Yuen, 2022
Installation View
Installation Performance in Action : Diptych Video
View of 2 Spectators (Left), View of Video and Majority Audience (Right)
Materials
Zoom, Video, Mirrored Medium, Lined Boxes, Audience
Artist Statement
Digital technologies have introduced a new medium for directing agency, subjectivity, and objectivity in addition to the cinematic gaze. These manufactured and literary boundaries mediate power dynamics between bodies of sex and the materiality of particularly female bodies. Gaze Watch Parties is a disruption of these agency boundaries that define one’s existence in relation to the Other. It breaks down the distance that protects against vulnerability and undesirable self-confrontation through digital glitches that disrupt the roles of Subject and Object.
Zoom has introduced an abstract confrontation of the self, gaze, and power construction: video calls allow one to simultaneously possess subjective and objective roles as one is both looking and looked at another. Video settings introduce new agency power dynamics as an audience can watch a speaker anonymously, much like the use of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory between female actresses and male spectators. However, unlike traditional cinema, one is also forced to confront oneself on camera, which introduces the abjection of self and disorientation of the inhabitation of space, as explored by Sarah Ahmed. Distance and self-orientation, whether through digital mediums or cinematic screens, have always been used as a reliable boundary to mediate bodies and to create safe private spaces.
Gaze Watch Parties unfixes these boundaries for an eventual decomposition of subjectivity, objectivity, and orientation. The installation and performance incorporates Zoom calls, digital video, and spectators to reverse the roles of the Subject and Object. First, a clip of Marilyn Monroe’s “River of No Return”, the status quo of male gaze studies, is manipulated with other modern cinematic references that is viewed by two spectators in the privacy of confined boxes. They are assigned simple roles as Subjects, and Marilyn the Object. At the end of the film, the two subjects face each other, their own self-image, then learn that they were also objects of the gaze for a greater audience in another space. This confrontation manipulates the perception of relative space assumed power dynamics created by spectatorship.
This disruption is simulated through a cumulative glitch of technology and awareness that gradually unfixes these set boundaries. The mirror lined boxes, edited overlay of eyes, and facing seats the two spectators create an immersive, disorienting experience of proximity to others and challenge the true privacy of manipulated environments. Alas, Gaze Watch Parties demands the confrontation of agency, vulnerability, and the reliability of boundaries. The power of looking has been founded in the ability to look without responsibility, but these boundaries are rather unfixed, manipulative, and can be non-consensual. The piece ends with a downloadable recording of the experience. Alas, the performance of the Object and spectatorship of the Subject has been long positioned as ephemeral experiences that now face its greatest enemy: permanent documentation.
*The manipulated video sample’s a clip from the movie “River of No Return”, 1954. Full credit of the original sample video to original authors.
Installation Various Views
