Camera Performed: Visualising the Behaviours of Technology in Digital Performance

Abstract

Continuing the discussion of artistic practices as a form of, or reaction to, surveillance societies, this chapter responds to new forms of visualization as they are conceived in art. Addressing the space of surveillance that contemporary technologies create, it examines the webcam and its attendant meanings for surveillance. It considers a metaphorical and social deconstruction of the webcam in contemporary art practice. It also challenges the notion of digital representation by arguing that networked practices are inherently dialogical and performative. Exemplified in Glenlandia (2005–2007), a digital media work, by British artist Susan Collins, the webcam becomes an embodied instrument that reproduces an identity through surveillance, mapping and digital crossover visualization. This chapter considers the ways in which Susan Collins uses the webcam as a performative device to complicate the entangled representations of real-time and real-place in contemporary digital art. With reference to poststructural theory and contemporary art historical discourses pertaining to media art and lens culture, particularly in the writings of media artist and Professor Christopher Salter and media choreographer Johannes Birringer, I reconsider how the digital lens performs a detournement through the power of the gaze.