Drama of the Gaze

OTE stages encounters that dramatise the act of looking: looking at art, looking at people looking at art, looking at representations of people in art. The drama of looks offers an opportunity to explore the power of the gaze as it operates in OTE. Theories of the gaze have, at least since the 1970s, shown us that looking at art is not a neutral activity. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) demonstrated how reproductions of artworks are vehicles for the reproducer’s argument; Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) established a theoretical basis for the gendered gaze, ‘split between active/male and passive/female’.[12]

Recorded texts such as film and video capture and transform their subjects into objects of the current viewer’s gaze, giving the viewer voyeuristic power over the subject depicted. The surveillance gaze, arguably the most relevant manifestation of the power of the gaze for our purposes, was theorised by Foucault as the ‘inspecting gaze’ in his study of prison systems and, by extension, all authoritarian institutions such as the state, in Discipline and Punish.[13] As Jonathan Schroeder notes, ‘to gaze implies more than to look at — it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze’.[14]

Applying a typology of gazes to Figure 11 reveals a complex pattern of power relations due to the presence of additional screens. As a starting point, we can note that the film Telephone offers a spectator the voyeuristic pleasure of looking at the object of the gaze. In the case of this video still, such voyeuristic pleasure is possibly enhanced by the face’s feminine gender, blindfolded with lace, in a close-up shot. This is the look of the camera with which, in Telephone, a spectator is encouraged to identify, since each performer directly addresses the viewer in the intimate style of a dating video. This direct address to the viewer suggests another type of gaze. The addition of the head-mounted eye-tracking camera adds to the drama of gazes by capturing the reflections of both the camera-wearing ‘participant’ (played by the artist to preserve the anonymity of consenting participants) and Svetlana. A spectator is able, then, to gaze at all three objects simultaneously: the performer in Telephone, the participant, and Svetlana. The identification of spectator-as-camera is particularly strong since the camera is an eye-tracking device, and literally offers an eye’s view. From the vantage of the head-mounted camera, we can see the intra-diegetic gazes of the participant on the Telephone performer, and Svetlana’s gaze on the participant. 

It should be noted at this point that Figure 11 has been altered to enhance the pattern of reflections. This manoeuvre enhances the performance of OTE by vividly illustrating our argument but, further, it reproduces the processes that capture personal data online, where such material is recycled and fed back to us as if it were an authentic reflection of ourselves. Kirsty Best’s study of digital screen users’ perceptions of surveillance demonstrates that, despite evidence showing that surveillance leads to the circulation of convoluted and inaccurate personal information, most people believe data gathering is transparent and accurate, and that only wrong deeds are punished. In Best’s study, this belief persists in spite of a significant proportion of respondents acknowledging that they themselves give false information online as a way of gaining a sense of control.[15]

A kind of ocularcentrism that privileges screen experience over embodied experience is evident in the way visitors engaged with OTE, meaning that the video Telephone was frequently understood as the work over the experience more generally. Furthermore, the screen offered participants a refuge from Svetlana’s overt performance of surveillance. The behaviour of the consenting participants was particularly revealing. They tended to be much more compliant than visitors who implicitly participated by observing the work or refusing to be involved. These visitors, free of the eye-tracking device, were more aware of Svetlana’s actions and more playful in their responses to her, moving freely in the space and observing Svetlana’s performance of surveillance.[16] 

These visitors were unlikely to become participants, having already seen the test film Telephone. For most visitors to OTE, it seems that the gaze captured on screen trumps the live encounter between performer and visitor, which works against opportunities for resistance. 

These encounters raise questions about space and power, showing how space is filled and manipulated by gazes, influencing where and how one looks and is looked at. The screen itself is a player in these dynamics, appearing to offer participants an undemanding place to rest their gaze. But this particular screen returns the gaze as it captures viewing behaviour through eye-tracking software. This allows us to extend our interpretations of the photographic video stills even further. Figures 12 and 14 build on the discussion of Figures 11 and 13 by adding data visualisations to the re-enactment video stills. The heat map data shows the participant attentive to the set task — looking hard at the face on screen — but they are also aware of being watched, as indicated by the green heat signature on Svetlana’s face. It also betrays the participant looking at herself in the act of looking, focussing on her reflected eyes. 

Extracting photographic stills from the re-enactment video allows the current viewer’s gaze to take in the whole drama. But it is unclear who holds power over whom. Unlike the one-directional power perspective of the Foucauldian Panopticon, images in the internet age are promiscuous. Online surveillance is ubiquitous and difficult to avoid if one wishes to participate in civic life, as the central tower from which the inspecting gaze issues forth has been transformed into a complex and constantly evolving pattern of gazes. ‘Circulationism’ is Hito Steyerl’s word for the afterlife of images that proliferate and transform, taking on a life of their own and, in many of her provocative examples, eclipse ‘real’ life. Steyerl’s neologism is used to critique the vacuous ‘public relations of images across social networks’, but she also reserves the possibility that a reinvented circulationism might be a critical tool for ‘exposing state scopophilia, capital compliance, and wholesale surveillance’.[17] By using eye-tracking imagery for artistic purposes, the authors propose that circulationism is in operation, and that it performs a critical function in raising awareness about data retention and its complexities.