THINGS I NEVER SAY
I moved to San Deigo in 2008, and discovered a culture of surfcams and hotelcams created for the tourism industry that in effect provided surveillance of the public boardwalks and parks of the area. I wondered if anyone monitored them, and if any one person could possibly watch them all at the same time. I decided to take on my naturally reserved personality by using the webcams to communicate my most secret thoughts to an audience who may or may not be watching.
For Things I Never Say, I stepped into the frame of San Diego's publicly accessible webcams, using the surveillance site as an opportunity for performance. Over the course of several weeks, I held signs up in front of the webcams, confessing my darkest thoughts one word at a time to an online audience. I documented the streaming video as stills and re-presented the footage on a networked array of monitors at Calit2.
VIDEOS
EXHIBITION
For the HIPerSpace wall at Calit2, I displayed a grid of the stills so that viewers could see how the images changed over time. I also created a 4K version of the piece for the Calit2 Auditorium, which was included in the CineGrid Exchange Screening in 2010.
Each time that I performed at a new site, I was surprised by the reaction of passers-by, who were not only curious about my project, but would offer suggestions for the next thing I could say. When I created the gallery installation for ARTProduce in June of 2011, I turned an entire wall of the gallery into a chalkboard so that visitors to the gallery could write their own things they never say. A webcam pointed at the gallery captured everyone's writing, was streamed live online, and also to a monitor in the space, so that the audience could watch themselves.
For the ART Produce garden, I curated a series of videos from members of the local community who deal with performance in public space. We projected the videos on a large outdoor wall so that anyone passing by could watch.