By Khizar Zaheer
I CAN’T ESCAPE THE FEELING THAT I’M SOMEHOW BEING TESTED.
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Prologue Act of Play Act of Truth Act of Double Act of Self Epilogue
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Prologue What do you do when no one is looking? We act as a default. Bound by the conventions of society, we adapt and change to the social requirements of spaces which are designed for human behaviour rather than a result of it.
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You know that moment when you’re walking down the street and suddenly you stop. You don’t know what, but something slows you down. You become hyper-conscious of your consciousness. You start thinking about the act of thinking and become aware of your surroundings. A minute starts to feel like a minute. Almost every day our brain is unconsciously processing information and stimuli at a fast pace but the moment you start to slow down, your brain needs more time to process and that is what I refer to as “The Moment.” To translate this moment into an architectural installation, I recreated the parameters of “The Moment.” Using the techniques commonly found in filmmaking such as lighting and framing, I constructed an environment in which the subject is on display for the audience, allowing the participant to become hyper conscious of their surroundings. This environment can have a similar effect of slowing down. The only variable that is not controlled is the framing of “The Moment”, which is dictated by the audience through the medium of documentation; pictures and film.
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An effective translation of “The Moment� in the digital world is Instagram in which users have created a separate personality that is portrayed to a digital audience. Instagram is a collection of moments in stasis. To put this into an example, if I was to travel to Hawaii and see something that slows me down, it becomes a moment and I capture it and upload it to Instagram. If I go back to that same place a year later and see the same thing, my brain processes it at a much faster pace so that moment of slowing down is nonexistent. However, if I look at the picture I took a year ago on Instagram, that moment remains in its unaltered state in our mind. The question to pose is does the moment change and decay with time? Since Instagram uses a static medium such as pictures, the moment is also in stasis. So, what does that mean in the medium of motion pictures which is time based yet composed of multiple static elements.
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Everything is made up of moments. We remember in moments, dream in moments, and appreciate in moments. Whether in our daily lives or in imagined worlds, we are invested in a moment of the whole and its varying timelines. In motion pictures, we laugh, cry, get scared and feel joy, which must mean that we should be able to empathize more with moving images as it accesses a variety of our emotions. That is not always the case as the medium can remove the audience twice from projecting onto it; the character’s mannerisms and where the camera is leading us is already determined and charges a narrative to which we much adapt. This complicates the process of projection as two aspects have already been defined outside of our imagination.
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On the other hand, pictures have only one aspect that inherently removes us from the act of projecting, which is the scenario it is captured in. We can project our mannerisms, what happens next and points of interests onto them. All these mediums have one thing in common, they can be devoid of context and we would still feel the same about them. As empathetic and imaginative creatures, we end up inadvertently romanticizing memories and forming dialogues and narrative around moments that if played out, don’t follow where our thought process leads us. How do we start to understand and create these moments without context?
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Since the beginning of human existence, we have been tools of surveillance. Whereas cameras record, we overwrite. We act in spaces under the surveillance of others, with the understanding that memory is fractured and overwritten by the thousands of processes taking place throughout the day. Memory is faulty and fragile, bound by bias. However, external surveillance, that is not human, has created the loss of anonymity through its neutrality and replicability. To find the line between theatre and honesty is to break the threshold that exists within spaces of surveillance and anonymity. Pure honesty is the liberation of an individual into an ideal. Through the act of eroding the consciousness of being under surveillance and playing between the threshold of theatre and life, we can start to find a glimpse of honesty.
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Act of Play While we watch; Will they play? To play is to allow for a momentary loss in the subconscious act of receiving surveillance.
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To understand the relationship between th consciousness of being watched and the act of playing in a space, the environment must be realeased from its bias. The concept behind this installation was to break away from the original intention of the space from a classroom and reimagine it instead as an unfamiliar environment. Around the room hung cardboard pieces floating in space and frozen in time as a red sun illuminates the room.
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The eye in the middle of the room acts as a form of surveillance that the participant is aware of. Throughout the space are rolling chairs which allow for the possibility of play to occur. Through this installation, I was able to see a glimpse of the participant’s personality in spaces of digital surveillance when no one is present. By the end of the experiment, each participant had rearranged the room from its previous composition.
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Act of Truth Can you confess if you are under surveillance? To confess is to allow for a momentary recognition of shame.
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When someone tells you a secret, the giver of the secret forms a spatial bubble around themselves in which you will never bring up that secret around them, if you wish to share it. When you receive a secret and you don’t know whose secret you are keeping, a spatial bubble forms around you because you do not know whom to kee the secret from. The aim of this installation piece was to understand the vulnerability of both an audience and the giver of a secret in which both may remain anonymous. The room was divided into two spaces, one for the audience who watch a projected screen and the other for a confessor who type onto a laptop.
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Through a series of questions, the confessor must answer questions that create a self-reflective atmosphere while testing the limits of how honest they are willing to be in spaces of anonymity. The receivers of these confessions will create their own atmosphere as they may relate to the confessions or feel uncomfortable in the presence of not knowing who’s secrets they carry. Although the audience may reflect in any way they choose, the orientation of the room and the use of surveillance limit their physical reactions in these spaces. That is not to say that during these confessions, the receivers forget that they are being watched. The experiment becomes an act of freedom and imprisonment.
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Act of Double Hear their confessions; Talk to your double To look at yourself is a momentary loss in placement.
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When using honesty as a tool to start to understand someone’s personality, we must recognize that with these installations comes barriers that still exist between the participant and the tools of surveillance. One of the most profound interactions we have daily is with ourselves as we look in the mirror. As empathetic creatures, we find reasons to project our feelings on others however the mirror is a projection of our current state and so it becomes hard to disassociate our internal emotions from the character we see reflected in front of us. The way we approach interactions with ourselves speaks volumes to the way we feel about ourselves. It is an odd sensation because the person we see in the mirror is devoid of any empathetic qualities and so, we only see our ‘souls’.
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This installation used a one-way mirror in which the subjects would look at their reflections while a camera recorded them from the other side. Using confessions from the previous act, a one-minute collated confessional was recorded and played to the right of the participant. The sound played an important role in pulling the attention towards the mirror as it was audible from only a few feet away. This prompted the interaction for the duration of the sound loop. Along with a series of videos that were taken, there was a camera taking two second exposures at every 5 second interval. Time is the constant erasure of you now and before. Photographs are frozen in time and exist within an ideal instanceand represent a moment of yourself. These long exposure photographs allow for your erased selves to build a portrait of your personality. The movement and direction of the subject shows their confrontation and familiarity, or lack there of, with themselves and their doubles.
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Act of Self Can you confront your past again? To self-reflect is to allow for a momentary loss in confidence
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Throughout my thesis I have been tackling the idea of personality, past, present and honesty. In this final installation, I have created a 6’x6’x8’ room in which a participant enters from the right and exists from the left. At the end of each corridor is a camera that records the events within the room for audience to see. As the participant makes their way into the room, they see a reflection of themselves in the mirror. When they make their way to the left side of the room, they realize that the mirror is one way and that they can see through to the other side. This interaction prompts a recollection of the past of what the participant did a few seconds ago and if anyone else was watching. Whereas the participant recollects their past self, the audience see the interaction between the past and present happen at the same moment. This is possible through a 10 second delay of the right camera and a real-time live view from the left camera.
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Epilogue What is your confession? About half a year ago I was sitting in a room alone and decided to walk on the table.
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My exploration started by asking myself, how can we begin to use a space honestly when we are not being watched by others or bound by the social conventions of that space. I believe we need to design as a result of human behavior rather than a reason for it. Through this, I became interested in the social implications of honesty. The exploration evolved from the honesty of space to the honesty of people interacting with each other and themselves. I began constructing installations in which the architecture allows for these spatial moments in which people have the chance to be honest with anonymity. What they choose to do in the space reflects their personality. I am using all these devices, the architecture, the filming, the drawing, the collection of time, and the erasure of people to understand a person’s personality within the realm of neutrality that I am capturing you in. I must put you in spaces in which you will have to confront yourself, others and attempt to be who you want to be in that space. You have the choice to be fully honest or partially honest. Regardless of your choice, it allows me to access to a glimpse of our underlying layers that make you a person rather than the surface level projection we may present to others.
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