Let's begin by moving inwardly, toward the source. Without: an ordinary warehouse, one of any number in the warehouse district; within: the edifice, wide and low, resolves itself as mostly empty. Not terribly unusual by itself, but it's to that which keeps the building from total abandonment that we turn our attention.
The sole inhabitant of the interior would vary, of course, from warehouse to warehouse: a single segment of hallway, perhaps, a section of a room. A vestibule mostly open, lacking one or more of its expected walls. From an observer on the ground, it would look like a wedge of somewhere else transported into the middle of the warehouse floor, not a place, but a fraction of a place. A sliver of a metro station, a part of a gallery, a fragment of a shopping center. Not an entire corridor, but a moiety of one, starting and stopping abruptly, the edges of wall and flooring cutting off along a very specific angle. Because across from this set, where the angles converge, is a pole sticking out of the earth, a precisely aimed camera perched atop.
There is no portion of set that does not exist within the camera's vision. From the camera feed: an ordinary location; from the ground, the set itself: the portions of the walls invisible to the camera remain not so much as painted, the floor untiled, uncarpeted. In some cases, the invisible portions of walls are nonexistent entirely: if the camera looks out across a gallery festooned with a colonnade, for example, the wall sections blocked by the pillars from the camera's view would remain unconstructed, so from the ground it appears a curious set of double columns.
And here acts as our spoke from which to move outward again, and back inward to another place. The camera in the corner of each of these sets, at each of these warehouses, feeds toward the center, the art instillation at the contemporary gallery in London that links each of these video casts from each of these sets at each of these warehouses around the world- the juxtaposition and assembly of these feeds creating spaces that never were. For each of these sets are replicas of one another: they replicate one another, but not duplicate each other, each playing the role of a different corner of the same fictional room, not one contiguous space, but the illusion thereof. Each feed streamed back to the instillation at the art gallery in London, locations all around the world all playing a small part at creating the illusion of one location. What does such a work say? What anxieties does such a piece reflect? Exploring the boundaries of theatre and fiction, of three men making a tiger, of the sliding scale of privacy and security under the surveillance state.
Which theme brings us to the final external internality: the art instillation would probably be impressive enough viewed at night, consisting of just the locations themselves, reflect a massive coordination of infrastructure to capture a fake location made of real locations scattered among the globe, but the artist went a step beyond. The central art exhibit is in London, which is one of the most modern cities in the world, but also one of the most surveilled cities as well by far. It is estimated that there is one camera to every fourteen residents in the city of London. Instead of these partial hallways being empty spaces, this ratio of people to cameras is replicated in the art instillation, at each participating location.
From all over the world, fourteen actors per location were carefully cast not only for specificity in bodily proportions (that they be able to pass as one another) but also their sense of timing and bodily control (that they be able to replicate precisely one another's motions.) A figure onscreen walks down the corridor, passing into blindspots sometimes, but more frequently being recorded from more than one angle at a time: these actor-models have trained hard to go through precise motions as each's fictional counterpart, each's wandering figure, gets caught on more than one camera. Stepping, turning, speeding up, slowing down. Even the tiniest hiccough in a person's step is a carefully choreographed dance.
If at the exhibit, hallways lined with monitors, it would cross one's mind to question how many filmsets are running concurrently, it would be tempting to think that there would be at least one set would have more than one camera; such options would be set to rest as each set breaks differently, as the possible meaning of the piece spirals out: a commentary on resistance? on free will? a commentary on the expansion of potential meanings itself? For the question would cross one's mind beforehand, would one alteration in routine between the camera feeds break the immersion? Would differences stick out and be noticed immediately by the patternseeking parts of our brains, or rather would the compounding of evidence elsewhere on all the other feeds add up to erase the microdistinctions between performances? How much compounding of change would it take to shatter the illusion entirely? If each angle held one distinction from the others, would it read as a contiguous space still? Thus, the performers break and reform, engaging in these bending and stretching of the immersion as experiments and as freeform acting exercises, and, as it crosses the mind of the gallerygoer watching this that this last exercise is entirely a step too far, that even the merest deliberate difference would break the central artistic metaphor entirely, no sooner had one thought this than the models snap back into synchronicity as if nothing had happened. Which raises themes of its own: the uncertainty of evidence and reality even in an industrialized setting, the ambiguity of the past when it's only accessible through the present, and, perhaps musing on the too-convenient timing of it all, the surveiller becoming the surveilled.
Because it's here that the audience member notices a security camera on a pole, where the other wall would be: in theatre it's called a fourth wall, but in a hallway, in any hallway of any length, there are only two walls, and so the audience would lie beyond the second. And it's here that you perhaps feel the movement of your own counterparts, people you've never met performing your same routine in portions of sections built in warehouses all over the world, in front of banks of monitors perhaps the same feed you're receiving, but perhaps receiving a suite of camera feeds all on their own, each of them. And if one were to turn a corner and to see a portion of the set that one had not before seen, that the set continues unobserved, would one find that odd, when one had gone one's whole life thinking it normal? And if one were to walk down this hall in pre-rehearsed rhythm, as the banks of monitors dimmed as their pictures fuzzed and grayed as they started showing feeds of feeds of feeds. And the hallways stretched out so far, and so far, and on both sides now, and all four sides now, and if the hallways continued to dim and dim, the glows of the monitors not enough to see by, and if one were moving by prerehearsed movement now, pressing forward by strength of muscle memory of all that practice, would even a break for a freeform release from the choreography be enough to escape? And if, as you started walking faster now, the cameras got closer to you as the hallway narrowed, and were spaced closer together in the hallway as the hallway shrunk, and the replicated segment of hallway accordioned in on itself, and if the lights dimmed completely now and all you saw out of the corners of your eyes are those dim red recording lights with the purple veins floating around them in the dark, and if you felt hot breath down the back of your neck just as you felt a neck right there in front of your own breathing, as you exhaled and inhaled in time with the exhalations and inhalations in front and behind you, and if, pressing ever forward into the shrinking and shrinking hallway, you reached forward and brushed the back of someone's head just as you felt fingers caressing the back of your own scalp, would that finally erase the identity between the observer and the observed?
Because the figure on the monitor now slows down, and lowers their hand, and stops at the end of the hallway, and turns around. And discovers that the hallway wasn't nearly that long at all, wasn't nearly that long at all.
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