STALKSHOW
AM I SAFE WITH YOU?
StalkShow deals with the threat of insecurity and isolation in public spaces. It is a response to the desire to control situations and eliminate violence:
‘What is rejected and refused in the symbolic order reappears in reality. Specters, ghosts and phantoms haunt the world.’ 1).
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
A performer carries a backpack, containing a laptop with a touch screen. It is a wearable billboard, on which a webcam is attached. The webcam records the face of the user of the touch screen.
Individual audience members are invited to touch the screen and navigate through an archive of statements about the threat of insecurity and isolation.
By webcam and wireless connection, the live video portrait appears behind the statements on a large projection screen in the same public space.
The user sees himself 'watching' through a text-window. He 'watches' through a visual, technically created,
social-psychological frame of mind which seems to have a life of its own. The statements of other people are linked to his personally rendered image: statements about insecurity and isolation that do not seem controllable.
An ‘observing' face gazes down on the observing audience.
The StalkShow’s TEXTS derive from
agora-phobia-digitalis.org 3) where Lancel and Maat invite people living isolated, like a prisoner, a nun, an asylum seeker, a digipersona, to make statements about: 'personal strategies to deal with social spaces'. By touching the screen a menu appears, through which the participant of the StalkShow can identify with the prisoner, the digipersona, or other.
By navigating through their statements, the user shows a personal montage of social strategies; making these visible on the large projection screen. The statements are connected within a hypertext related structure.
TOUCH ME INTERACTION
When touching the screen the user starts a tangible relation with the back of a stranger carrying the billboard. He enters the intimacy of the vulnerable body of the stranger. Generating alertness, attraction or repulsion, the intimacy of the body plays a compelling role in the interface. The unexpected encounter with the mobile billboard and the navigation through the texts offer a confronting relation with the surrounding audience. The resulting interactivity is location- and context- specific.
Media and Public space
The StalkShow shows statements referring to slogans used in media-communication. They expose experiences and feelings of insecurity which are dominant in mainstream media, like on television and in newspapers. Through the Stalkshow Lancel and Maat aim to amplify these feelings to an extreme to be re-experienced and re-interpreted in the urban public space. In doing so the relativity of these feelings has the chance to be revealed.
STALKER
In the StalkShow the other is absent, replaced by projections. Both cherished and threatening projections represent fear and desire for the other, haunt the mind like a STALKER 2).
StalkShow invites the audience to ‘infiltrate’ a public space, like train stations, museums, squares, airports; and provide the alleged threat with a personal face and interpretive space, to show both its horror and its beauty.
Lancel and Maat create meeting places in which they research connections between social experiences in the virtual and in the physical space.
1) From:‘ ‘CTRL SPACE’, Peter Weibel on Jacques Lacan
2) Refering to Julia Kristeva in ‘Powers of horror’.
