An Obscure Camera
Description
The fascination with Camera Obscura has captured audience imagination drawing people worldwide from Victorian times to the present day. The spectacle of entering a dark room through which to witness and actively peer out to the surrounding landscape is both theatrically enticing and technically mysterious. An Obscure Camera develops these ideas for a 21st-century context.
We enter a large dark space and are immersed by a multitude of ornate Rococo frames projected onto the surrounding walls and ceiling. Each of these frames contains a close-up view of the live outdoor environment outside of the building. As we walk around the space, the frames move with us, traveling in accordance with our speed and direction. New subjects enter and pass through the frames as their viewpoint changes. We now find that we can begin to scan, track, and follow different features in the outdoor spaces, including its inhabitants, through our motion within the installation.
Evoking aspects of contemporary surveillance culture, the installation gives us the power to explore, seek, and inspect anything and anyone we find interesting. In doing so, we navigate the fine line between observer and voyeur, physically enacting the choices made by the countless algorithms that analyse our daily lives.
Location & Audience
The work is best suited for large dark indoor spaces that have light walls for projection and room for audiences to walk around. A cavernous dome-like space is ideal. There also needs to be a good throughflow of people around the venue (e.g. shoppers, commuters, visitors etc). Target audiences include those seeking original interactive experiences, and people curious about the technologies employed by multinational companies. The installation is playful and works well with groups, families as well as individuals. It is suitable for children 8 years upwards.
Choreographic Interventions & Engagement
The Obscure Camera has been further developed to encompass a series of choreographic interventions performed in open public spaces adjacent to the installation. This situation re-addresses the balance between observer and observed. Highlighting portraiture and composition, performers are given the agency to look back and acknowledge installation visitors, creating a fleeting intimacy mediated by the technology.
This aspect of Obscure Camera focuses on a series of workshops with local participants over a duration leading towards bespoke performances of choreographic scores. Performances can include Flexer & Sandiland professional dancers alongside local non-professional community participants ranging from over 60s to young people. Events can be developed in partnership with venues or organisations. Alternatively, the work can be presented with our professional dancers and existing community groups.
Artists Statement
For many years, we have worked with technologies that sense and track the human figure, integrating these tools into our choreographic practice. With the shift from analogue monitoring to today’s digitally networked infrastructures, a new wave of surveillance technologies now dominates both our public and private spaces. This has led us to ask: how can we grasp the ethical implications of systems whose workings are so deeply hidden from public view?
These systems and algorithms—employed by organisations ranging from commercial enterprises to government agencies—aim to recognise, categorise, and track the human figure. Yet the exact way they enact these choices remains opaque. While their function can be described objectively — images analysed and compared against vast datasets—there is little opportunity to understand these processes firsthand as immediate, physical acts.
In An Obscure Camera, we address these interactions on a phenomenological level, focusing on the participant’s physical action and kinaesthetic awareness. Through custom interactive technology, participants are given the agency to embody the algorithm itself. Moving within the installation space, they engage in the act of surveillance directly. In contrast to the minimal gestures of clicking a mouse or pressing a key, participants physically inhabit the role of tracker. In doing so, they are confronted—through their own movement—with the ethical and social realities of following and being followed by systems of corporate and institutional power.
Presentations
2024 Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (work in progress)
2024 Chichester University (work in progress)
2024 In Space, Edinburgh (work in progress)
2023 Brighton Dome (work in progress)
Credits
Conceived and Created by: Nic Sandiland
Producers: Yael Flexer / Madaline Wilson
AI Tracking Programming: Evan Morgan Paul Hayes, Chris Cowden
Supported by Arts Council England, The Brighton Dome, In Space, Arts Council England
