Abstract
Dan Graham's work with mirrors and installation from the 1970s provides an unexpected launchpad for understanding the structures underlying perception in Zoom interfaces. The article explores the intricacies of Graham's two-way mirrors as a means to articulate perceptual experiences of dancing in the Zoomosphere, with examples from teaching, choreographing and performing via Zoom during Covid 19 isolation conditions.
Highlights
Dan Graham’s work with mirrors and installation from the 1970s provides an unexpected launchpad for understanding the structures underlying perception in Zoom interfaces
I compare Zoom experiences of performance with visual artist Dan Graham’s work with mirrors from the 1970s, which he describes as situations in which audiences experience their own “perceptual processes.”1 Graham’s work from the 1970s is hauntingly prescient of the structures underlying perceptual and performative experience in Zoom: his use of two-way mirrors lays bare the intertwining of multiple perspectives in perception
I discuss Graham’s work in the context of performance because the structures of perception that he reveals are currently being experienced in an intensified mode during the Covid-19 crisis, with performance being shifted to online conferencing platforms: we are dancing in the Zoomosphere, a word I use to designate the virtual space created by video conferencing interfaces
Summary
As I will describe, Graham uses two-way mirrors with the overt aim of challenging the audience’s perceptual habits. For Albu, in the 1970s the use of mirrors shifted, to instead critique the supposed privacy and neutrality of aesthetic experience, literally showing viewers that they were part of a collectivity: “An increasing number of artists, including Vito Acconci, William Anastasi, Judith Baca, Daniel Buren, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Lynn Hershman, Bruce Nauman, and Peter Weibel, designed visual systems that incorporated competing reflective surfaces that would vie for participants’ attention and enable critical distance from the all-engulfing conditions of the society of the spectacle.” Albu provides a Foucauldian critique of the operation of power in mirrored environments, detailing the duality of surveillance and agency This aspect of her analysis is beyond the scope of this article, in which I largely focus, in a more basic way, on the processes of perception at play in Graham’s work. As I will explore below, this casts Graham’s “extreme visual inter-subjective intimacy” in a new light
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