Mona Hatoum, Don’t Smile, You’re on Camera!
1980
“Early on, Hatoum made works that concerned the body in relation to surveillance. In Don’t Smile, You’re on Camera! (1980), she trained a camera on an audience screening their images on a monitor. At the same time, images of body parts of different genders interrupted the live screening, making the audiences uncomfortable to the point that some people got up and walked away.”
“For this performance, people were sitting in the audience and I would scan their bodies with a close-up video camera. I was then mixing their images with naked bodies, pretending that I could see through their clothes, like an x-ray vision. They would then see themselves on the monitor. People would sometimes say: "Why are you doing this to me? Why are you invading my privacy?" It was daring. When I did it at the ICA a few people got up and left. It's very confrontational because they came to see a performance and then suddenly they are the performers.”
[x] [x]
1980
“Early on, Hatoum made works that concerned the body in relation to surveillance. In Don’t Smile, You’re on Camera! (1980), she trained a camera on an audience screening their images on a monitor. At the same time, images of body parts of different genders interrupted the live screening, making the audiences uncomfortable to the point that some people got up and walked away.”
“For this performance, people were sitting in the audience and I would scan their bodies with a close-up video camera. I was then mixing their images with naked bodies, pretending that I could see through their clothes, like an x-ray vision. They would then see themselves on the monitor. People would sometimes say: "Why are you doing this to me? Why are you invading my privacy?" It was daring. When I did it at the ICA a few people got up and left. It's very confrontational because they came to see a performance and then suddenly they are the performers.”
[x] [x]
Jean Prouvé
From Objects and Furniture Design 1917-1944
From Objects and Furniture Design 1917-1944
❤3
“Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth and nineteenth-century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage.
The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.”
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
[x]
The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.”
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
[x]
👏1
Տարվա եղանակները / Seasons of the Year (dir. Artavazd Pelechian, 1972)
❤2