VIDEO INSTALLATION / PERFORMANCE Yael Flexer - Nic Sandiland

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.