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Rear Window
Installation, 2001
Rear Window is an interactive 2-channel video installation
that is viewed from a window outside. Inside the video is projected
on a large screen and a camera is directed toward the window.
The video switches back and forth between a clip of Hitchcock's
famous "Rear Window"* and live video of viewers watching
the projection in the window.
In the clip of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" the original
crime scene is replaced by real-time video of the installation's
window. The audience is 'framed' in the context of the fictional
constructed image and the window becomes a stage.
Looking, looking back, being looked at and looking at oneself
looking.
The scenes interact following the logic of cinematic continuity:
the actors look at the viewer, and the viewer looks back at
the actors. But the usual voyeuristic mechanism is reversed
and the viewer's passive role of voyeur is interrupted when
the viewer becomes both the object and the subject of the gaze.
This project took place at White Box Gallery in Chelsea in
NYC in the summer of 2001.
*) Hitchcock's Rear Window is a study of voyeurism. The look
is central to the plot. In the movie the observant protagonist
(James Stewart) is a bored, wheel chair bound photographer
who obsessively watches his neighbors through his back window.
As the plot unfolds, Stewart believes he has witnessed a murder.
His girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, becomes drawn into the
speculation as the two try to unravel the mystery. Until the
very end we are not sure if a crime is committed or if it is
a construct of the imagination.
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