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JAMES COUPE<\/strong><\/p>\n ON THE OBSERVING OF THE OBSERVER OF THE OBSERVERS PANOPTIC PANORAMA #2: FIVE PEOPLE IN A ROOM Upcoming: SANCTUM (in collaboration with Juan Pampin) ON THE OBSERVING OF THE OBSERVER OF THE OBSERVERS<\/strong> “Sit, and wait. Stand, and walk. Proceed down a corridor, and enter a room. Listen, and react. Watch, and be watched. These, and other, more and less subtle cues and directives provide the logic behind James Coupe’s installation, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers<\/em>, at The Phillips Museum of Art. Over the course of a six-week installation in winter 2012, the Rothman and Curriculum Galleries were transformed into an enclosed theatre of observation, where anyone may enter, participate in, and subsequently become the exhibition.<\/p>\n The exhibition is comprised of a network of rooms, some physical, some virtual, and some, both at once. Certain rooms are located within the museum’s walls, while others are dispersed across the Franklin & Marshall campus, to be viewed remotely via multi-screen video feeds. Although most of these rooms appear generic and interchangeable, each is designed for a specific function: the installation layout includes a waiting room, a psychology testing room, the director’s office, a control room, a screening room, a chapel, a classroom, and four corridors; whereas the cross-campus locations include a dining room, a computer lab, a holding cell, a library reading area, and a dorm room. The exhibition’s maze-like layering of real and virtual spaces creates a kind of image echo-chamber, where the events seen on-screen appear at once familiar, routine, contained, and yet uncanny, erratic, and modular: a seemingly infinite regress of people and places.<\/p>\n Installed in each of the gallery rooms are cylindrical rings of high definition cameras affixed to ceiling-mounted steel poles, which have been configured to perpetually monitor a 360-degree view of their surroundings. The captured footage is then shown on the adjoining panels of computer monitors, which display panoramic yet spatially and temporally inconsistent video representations of each room and its visitors. Inconsistent, because computers process the video footage in real time, using facial recognition software to detect each visitor’s presence, and custom algorithms to determine the exact quantity of people and the duration for which their image will be visible on screen. Processed, recombined, displayed and then re-displayed, the video feeds exhibit a circuit of selves, others, and resolute emptiness – the effect is a paradoxical sense of delayed immediacy, or perhaps, intimate estrangement, oscillating between past and present, near and distant, ordinary and strange.”<\/em> [link to further documentation<\/a>]<\/p>\n PANOPTIC PANORAMA #2: FIVE PEOPLE IN A ROOM<\/strong> A cylindrical arrangement of five cameras is positioned in the center of the gallery, with the camera lenses panoptically configured to monitor a 360-degree field of view. The resulting panorama is then displayed on five screens on a wall. Software filters the video captured by the cameras to show only one person’s face on each screen. The footage of each person loops, only being replaced once a new person stands in front of one of the cameras. <\/p>\n The software demographically profiles these five people according to their age and gender and adds subtitles from corresponding Facebook status updates. For example, a 25-year-old male in the gallery is conjoined with text from a 25-year-old male on Facebook. The status updates function independently for each individual person, yet also work together as a narrative of five chunks of text representing the five demographics shown on the screens. Each time a new person enters the picture, the narrative is reconfigured without compromising the narrative across the five screens. Hence viewers find themselves in spatial and narrative dialogue\/contact with four other previous occupants of the gallery, unable to remove themselves from scrutiny until somebody else puts themselves on display.<\/p>\n Panoptic Panorama #2<\/em> juxtaposes the oppressive qualities of centralized control – from surveillance to profiling – with the persistent urge to broadcast oneself through status updates, and explores the resulting narrative (im)possibilities.<\/p>\n [link to further documentation<\/a>]<\/p>\n SANCTUM<\/strong> Sanctum<\/em> is a public art work that uses the persistent flow of people around the Henry Art Gallery as input, extracting narratives from the demographics of passers-by and the patterns of their movement. The flow of people is used as a physical analogue to another type of crowd, the virtual inhabitants of social networks such as Facebook.<\/p>\n As a person approaches the gallery, they are tracked, analyzed and recorded by video cameras programmed to identify people according to their age and gender. They hear a cacophony of voices, all telling stories. As they get closer to the gallery, the voices become clearer, gradually becoming a single voice that matches their age and gender, and telling a story composed from demographically-appropriate Facebook status updates. A grid of 18 large video monitors on the fa\u00e7ade of the gallery picks their face out of the crowd, automatically integrating footage of them with a variety of live and pre-recorded footage from around the gallery fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n The installation aims to create a locus of complex and intense social networking activity, reaching out of the gallery to embed the passer by. As unexpected fl\u00e2neurs<\/em>, people passing by the Henry are assaulted by a multitude of voices, videos and text, of which, as they approach the fa\u00e7ade, they will eventually become the focal point.<\/p>\n Join the Sanctum<\/em> Facebook application [here<\/a>]. By joining, your Facebook status updates will become content for Sanctum<\/em>‘s narrative system. All posts that you make to Facebook will remain anonymous \u2013 they will be tagged with age and gender, but no other personal data will be used. If you visit Sanctum<\/em> at the Henry Art Gallery, you can potentially see your status updates used as parts of stories that are generated.<\/p>\n [http:\/\/www.sanctum.io<\/a>]<\/p>\n James Coupe<\/strong><\/p>\n “In his recent work, British-born, Seattle-based artist James Coupe examines the power and meaning of surveillance in our everyday life by working with advanced surveillance technologies, including high definition video cameras, facial recognition software, and computer algorithms derived from popular search engines and social media sites. Coupe works in new media but his artistic practice is anchored in an engagement with older media – namely, cinema, literature, and, most recently, the panorama. Situated at the intersection of the virtual, the fictional, and the real, Coupe\u2019s work examines the ways that contemporary surveillance society simultaneously foregrounds self-observation and mutual observation, and thus mobilizes the classic scopophilic dialectic of voyeurism and exhibitionism. But, rather than subjecting surveillance to a systematic ideological critique, Coupe\u2019s interests lie in the way surveillance provides a theme and metaphor for exploring the paradoxes of the postmodern human condition.”<\/em><\/p>\n www.jamescoupe.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" JAMES COUPE ON THE OBSERVING OF THE OBSERVER OF THE OBSERVERS Lancaster, PA: ongoing, closes April 7th, 2013 PANOPTIC PANORAMA #2: FIVE PEOPLE IN A ROOM New York City: ongoing, closes April 17th, 2013 Upcoming: SANCTUM (in collaboration with Juan Pampin) Seattle, WA: opens May 5th, 2013 ON THE OBSERVING OF THE OBSERVER OF THE […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1660","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1660"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1670,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1660\/revisions\/1670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLancaster, PA: ongoing, closes April 7th, 2013<\/p>\n
\nNew York City: ongoing, closes April 17th, 2013<\/p>\n
\nSeattle, WA: opens May 5th, 2013<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\nPhillips Museum of Art
\nFranklin & Marshall College
\nLancaster, Pennsylvania
\nJan 30th – April 7th, 2013<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/corr2_flee_700.jpg\")
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\n– Excerpt from catalogue essay, “Waiting To Be Seen”<\/a><\/p>\n
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\nSheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design
\n2 West 13th St, New York City.
\nExhibited as part of The Public Private<\/em>, curated by Christiane Paul
\nFebruary 7 – April 17, 2013<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/narr4-700b.jpg\")
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\nHenry Art Gallery
\nUniversity of Washington
\nSeattle, Washington
\nMay 5, 2013 – November 5, 2015<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Henry2-700.jpg\")
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