{"id":1671,"date":"2013-03-07T18:05:06","date_gmt":"2013-03-08T01:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/?page_id=1671"},"modified":"2013-05-28T14:27:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-28T21:27:01","slug":"waiting-to-be-seen","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/?page_id=1671","title":{"rendered":"Waiting To Be Seen"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Johanna Gosse<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

Catalogue essay for the exhibition On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers<\/em>
\nThe Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College
\nLancaster, PA
\nJan 30 – April 7th, 2013<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026other people suffered as much from not being observed as he did, and [\u2026] they, too, felt meaningless unless they were being observed, and that this was the reason why they all observed and took snapshots and movies of each other, for fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence in the face of a dispersing universe with billions of Milky Ways like our own, settled with countless of life-bearing but hopelessly remote and therefore isolated planets like our own, a cosmos filled with incessant pulsations of exploding and collapsing suns, leaving no one, except man himself, to pay any attention to man and thereby lend him meaning\u2026\u201d<\/em>
\n– Friedrich D\u00fcrrenmatt, The Assignment<\/em><\/p>\n

\tSit, 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\u2019s 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 Gibson Galleries were transformed into an enclosed theatre of observation, where anyone may enter and subsequently \u201cbecome\u201d the exhibition.<\/p>\n

On the Observing<\/em> is comprised of a network of rooms, some physical, some virtual, and many, somewhere in between. Certain rooms are located within the museum\u2019s walls, while others are dispersed across the Franklin & Marshall campus, to be viewed remotely via multi-screen video feeds. Most rooms seem generic and interchangeable, yet each is assigned a specific function: the installation layout includes a waiting room, psychology testing room, director\u2019s office, control room, screening room, chapel, classroom, and four corridors. Pre-recorded and live footage of locations from across the campus\u2013a dining room, computer lab, holding cell, library reading area, and a dorm room\u2014are also integrated into the ever-changing film that is shown at regular intervals in the screening room. This maze-like layering of real and virtual spaces creates a kind of visual echo chamber, where the events on-screen appear at once ordinary and routine, and yet uncanny, erratic, and modular: a seemingly infinite regress of people, places, and events.<\/p>\n

Every room in the installation contains a curious feature: a ceiling-mounted steel pole hanging down to about shoulder-height, periscope-like. But, instead of offering a glimpse of what lies above the surface, these poles are actually watching you: affixed to the bottom of each is a cylindrical ring of high definition cameras that have been configured to perpetually monitor a 360-degree view of their surroundings. The captured footage is then shown on the adjoining five-panel screens, which display a panoramic yet spatially and temporally inconsistent video feed of each room and its visitors. Inconsistent, because computers process the video footage in real time, using facial recognition software to detect each visitor\u2019s 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 recycled, the video feeds exhibit a rotating circuit of selves, others, and vacant spaces\u2014the effect is a paradoxical sense of delayed immediacy, oscillating between past and present, near and distant, familiar and strange.<\/p>\n

By extending the scope of the observing gaze to the entire F&M campus, Coupe systematically blurs the distinction between the museum setting and the surrounding institutional spaces of the college, eroding the distinction between visitor and participant, viewer and viewed, voyeur and exhibitionist, ultimately rendering these categories ambiguous, if not totally obsolete. At first glance, the physical layout of the installation calls to mind Michel Foucault\u2019s famous description of the panoptic penitentiary conceived by Enlightenment-era philosopher Jeremy Bentham, wherein the prisoner\u2019s cells resembled \u201cso many small theatres.\u201d Yet, instead of erecting a centralized panoptic apparatus from which an all-seeing yet unseen eye can remotely survey a panoramic array of illuminated, stage-like compartments, the architectural and phenomenological experience of Coupe\u2019s installation is de-centralized, dispersed, labyrinthine\u2014more mise-en-abyme<\/em> than mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/em>. Here, no one can remain \u201cunseen,\u201d including the artist himself, whose image often resurfaces in the video feeds: a reminder that despite his physical absence, in virtual space, the artist is always present.<\/p>\n

This complex configuration of spaces, people, and screens is extended even further through its intensely self-reflexive and site-specific presentation. To begin, the museum setting is a space designed for looking\u2014not strictly at art and artifacts, but often, at other people. Within Coupe\u2019s installation, these dual attractions are fused into a total exhibitionist spectacle, wherein the viewer constitutes the viewed. And yet, just as often, this voyeuristic pleasure is denied: algorithmic code, rather than actual human presence, is what ultimately determines when people are shown on screen. Thus, occupied rooms will frequently appear unoccupied on-screen, and vice versa; such discrepancies threaten to foreclose the possibility of full narcissistic satisfaction via self-observation.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, as a college museum, The Phillips\u2019s institutional mission is part of the broader educational aims of the small liberal arts college that it calls home. Coupe reflects on this educational context by incorporating footage from remotely-monitored spaces across the campus; brought together, these videos comprise a panoramic portrait of everyday life on a campus that is itself monitored around-the-clock by an elaborate network of private, closed-circuit security cameras, just as most large institutions in the United States are today. Furthermore, he includes two rooms within the installation that directly invoke what he terms the \u201ceducational gaze\u201d: the classroom and the psychology testing room, which features a sound and video recording of a basic psychological experiment, the Asch conformity test, administered by F&M Psychology professor, John Campbell. Finally, beyond its exhibitionary and pedagogical functions, the museum also functions as a sanctuary, reserved for quiet reflection and contemplation, a kind of temple to the wonders of human culture (rather than the mysterious workings of the divine). In a winking nod to the museum\u2019s semi-sacral connotations, Coupe temporarily de-secularizes the galleries by transforming one room into a full-fledged chapel, outfitted with lectern, pews, and a looped recording of the college\u2019s actual chaplain, Rev. Susan Minasian, delivering a non-denominational sermon to a gathering of seemingly rapt (and algorithmically variable) congregants.<\/p>\n

In transforming not just the museum, but the entire F&M campus into an installation site, Coupe takes advantage of an enclosed \u201cset\u201d and captive population of actors and viewers, observers and observed. The project assumes broader site-specific implications due to the fact that Lancaster, Pennsylvania has recently garnered national attention as the most \u201csurveilled\u201d city in the United States. With a network of over 165 CCTV cameras and about 54,000 residents, Lancaster City has earned the dubious distinction of having more cameras per capita than any other city in the nation. Coupe\u2019s installation thus contains multiple, interlocking levels of site-specificity\u2014engaging the museum, the college campus, and the urban environment\u2014each of which are routinely surveilled by a network of closed circuit security cameras. By raising questions about the ubiquity of surveillance in our private and public lives, as well as the paradoxes of living and working in a \u201csurveillance society,\u201d Coupe\u2019s installation uses its platform within the \u201cclosed set\u201d of the college campus in order to launch a larger, more public, and essentially open system\u2014incorporating not only museum visitors, but indirectly, the entire campus population, and the surrounding urban environment.<\/p>\n

The exhibition\u2019s title, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers<\/em>, is taken from the subtitle of Der Auftrag<\/em> or The Assignment<\/em>, a German-language mystery novella written by the Swiss author Friedrich D\u00fcrrenmatt in 1986. D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s story is a \u201csurveillance thriller\u201d about a filmmaker who is hired to make a documentary about the mysterious circumstances surrounding a woman\u2019s gruesome murder in an unnamed North African country. Before long, the filmmaker realizes that she, too, is under constant surveillance, just like the murdered woman was before her death. Although it is ostensibly framed as a murder mystery, the subject of The Assignment<\/em> is, in fact, the problem of constant observation, the hazards and pleasures of watching and being watched, or, to modify a phrase of Freud\u2019s, what we might call \u201cthe gaze and its vicissitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

To visit On the Observing<\/em> is to the assume the role of a character in D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s story: the obsessive voyeur, psychiatrist Otto von Lambert, and the unintentional exhibitionist, his wife, Tina, who flees to North Africa to escape her husband\u2019s analytical gaze; the ambitious filmmaker, F., who yearns to make a film of the entire world \u201cby combining random scenes into a whole;\u201d Polypheme, the deranged inhabitant of an abandoned underground surveillance bunker where all human personnel have long been replaced by computers; and finally, the philosopher, through whom D\u00fcrrenmatt proposes a series of logical hypotheses on the central role of surveillance in religion, war, modernity, and all human relationships. Coupe borrowed the philosopher\u2019s musings, and converted them into imperative directions, such as \u201cFeel disrespected,\u201d or \u201cBe tormented by the need to be seen;\u201d he then used the text as subtitles in the algorithmic film shown in the screening room. On the soundtrack, a woman\u2019s voice recites the subtitles in the gentle yet authoritative tone of a self-help manual or an automated recording; her recurrent acoustic presence in the galleries is at once soothing and eerie, a warm bath of sound that threatens to overtake.<\/p>\n

As the first in a four-part series of works called Surveillance Suite<\/em>, which Coupe will exhibit throughout 2013, On the Observing<\/em> questions the commonly held view that surveillance operates strictly as a mechanism of social control. Without minimizing the repressive and often pernicious effects of surveillance, Coupe challenges us to consider the ways that we actually invite and desire observation as a means to social recognition, validation, and basic human connection. Coupe is thus less interested in the disciplinary effects of surveillance than with how these technologies of observation have become a kind of second nature, and how we, as both subjects and objects of surveillance, have become virtuosic practitioners of those same techniques and technologies that monitor and regulate our everyday lives.<\/p>\n

Here, and in previous projects, Coupe reflects on the role of observation in the digital age, by considering how new technologies might both respond to and produce certain social behaviors and desires. In Coupe\u2019s own words: \u201cIn order to make art that can reveal new aspects of ourselves, we cannot continue to paint pictures of reality, or simply appropriate its existing signifiers. Rather, we must start authoring the real, working directly with our society\u2019s vast data-driven systems rather than simply representing them via inferior media.\u201d Preferring direct \u201cauthorship\u201d of the real to a critical representation of it, Coupe distinguishes himself from other contemporary artists who regard surveillance as a remote, disembodied \u201ceye-of-power\u201d that monitors us from above, or, put simply, as a disciplinary apparatus.<\/p>\n

Situated at the intersection of the virtual, the fictional, and the real, Coupe\u2019s practice examines the ways that contemporary modes of surveillance mobilize both self-observation and mutual observation, making voyeur-exhibitionists of us all, a breakdown in the classic scopophiliac dialectic. But, rather than subjecting surveillance to a systematic ideological critique in the manner of tactical media activists, Coupe\u2019s interests lie in exploring how surveillance provides a metaphor for the conditions of everyday life in the digital age.<\/p>\n

Coupe\u2019s work affirms the literary insights of D\u00fcrrenmatt, who regarded surveillance not just as a threat to privacy, but as constitutive of the modern human condition, writing that: \u201cA very suitable definition of contemporary man might be that he is man under observation.\u201d In as much as surveillance inspires anxiety and paranoia, it is also utterly routine, and an increasingly popular strategy for lending meaning to our daily lives\u2014with each status update, selfie, check-in, “like,” and tweet we project into the digital ether. Observation, D\u00fcrrenmatt argues, lends meaning and purpose to our activities; and in turn, to be completely unobserved would make one feel insignificant, alone, adrift, \u201cstaggering along in the mad hope of somehow finding someone to be observed by somewhere.\u201d D\u00fcrrenmatt went so far as to suggest that all the major geopolitical conflicts of his day\u2014the nuclear arms race, clashes of religious fundamentalisms, terrorist violence\u2014could be traced back to the intrinsic human desire to be watched by a higher power\u2014whether the nation-state, a rival global superpower, or God himself. Although The Assignment<\/em> was written in 1986, at the dawn of the so-called digital age, D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s book anticipated many of the ethical, political, and philosophical challenges that accompany our own increasingly mediated and monitored lives, while also diagnosing the mix of paranoia and dependency that exemplifies contemporary attitudes to what we call \u201csurveillance society.\u201d Coupe\u2019s surveillant art works recuperate D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s theories for today\u2019s digital era, one characterized by scandalous \u201cleaks\u201d and viral videos, perpetual monitoring and constant over-sharing, a time when the world is watching like never before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>

by Johanna Gosse Catalogue essay for the exhibition On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers The Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College Lancaster, PA Jan 30 – April 7th, 2013 \u201c\u2026other people suffered as much from not being observed as he did, and [\u2026] they, too, felt meaningless unless they were […]<\/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-1671","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1671","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=1671"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1701,"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1671\/revisions\/1701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamescoupe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}