THE PERFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF VIDEO IN THE STREETS
As a media artist, Michelle explores the performative potential of objects and space. She examines the intertwining of social networks and everyday social spaces with their technological counterparts and creates performances, installations and online works that are concerned with issues of communication, surveillance, psychogeography, presence, intimacy, social ritual, collaboration and public participation. Michelle presented some of her works:
"Life: A User's Manual" (2003-2006)
"Life: a user's manual" is an ongoing series that exposes and examines the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they are overlaid with the more tangible and perceptible spaces of the city. Sourcing surveillance footage using a mobile video scanner, unseen stories are pieced together. Staged as walking performances, the public is invited on tours of the city where hidden layers and forbidden fragments are revealed. Each iteration of the work addresses issues of mobility, transience, privacy, ownership and borderlines and challenges the ideas of locale and presence.
"Black Leather Projector Purse"
"Black Leather Projector Purse" is a mobile broadcast device used to project live, intercepted surveillance transmissions back onto the architectural skin of the city.
"Peek-a-boo Cantenna"
"Peek-a-boo Cantenna" is a 2.4 Ghz antenna with embedded lcd monitor used to intercept and view wireless CCTV transmissions.
"Exploration #5" (2006)
"Exploration #5" is a look into the daily activities of an office building environment, and how role, function, and personal history direct different people's movements and engagement with these spaces. The work takes the form of series of live and prerecorded video transmissions relating to person and space that are distributed throughout the building. A visitor to the site is given special equipment to wear which allows this person to intercept and view wireless video transmissions. By wearing this equipment, the assumes the performative role of 'The Explorer', entering into an exploratory journey of the strange corners of urban environs, and encounters with the people that occupy these spaces.
"Friluftskino": Experiments in Open-Air Surveillance Cinema (2007)
The city of Oslo provides the source and the projection surface for an open-air urban cinema. Using a powerful video beamer and video scanner, live surveillance intercepted from wireless CCTV cameras is captured and then rebroadcasted upon the city walls. The live transmission ideally lasts as long as a feature length film and also takes its title from a cinematic source according to the scene created by the surveillance camera.
The extended time of the intervention is intended to allow one to contemplate the live image which, contrary to being titillating and action-filled, is actually empty and still, a place of non-action. They are spaces to be filled, through subtle shifts that take place within the observed scene, or through the viewer's own physical or imagined intervention. Spatial boundary conventions of private and public, inside and outside are challenged by the reality of the radio transmission which moves beyond walls and onto the street. By accessing these images one is also offered a view into how the public depicts and represents itself through surveillance and a glimpse into the ways the city itself is defined and structured.
