Building Under Watch

I was given the task of creating a composition that utilized or challenged the immersive motion capture technologies of an Experimental Studio, called B2 and while being introduced to the technology, I volunteered to wear a sensor to demonstrate the motion capture capabilities. Instinctually, I began to move and dance in the space with the technology responding to me. Then, the technician redirected me to stand in prescribed places in the room to demonstrate the sensor triggering sound. In that moment my body shifted from creator to a tool of the technology. Then, the lighting system was added. Not only was the sound changing with my movements, but now three bright lights were also shining on me from different directions. With the nearly zero lag time of the technology, the intense light was inescapable, and made my movements hypervisible to my peers sitting in the dark room. This moment was a visual cue, a reminder that I was being tracked. With the physical reminder of the light, I recognized the resistant response that arose in my body as parallel to my response to being surveilled.  

 

Despite my resistant feelings, the requirement to create a performance that was responsive to the space remained. My visceral aversion to technology that functions through surveillance, signaled to me that attempting art in this space alone would be precarious, and maybe even dangerous. In this space of recognizing that I would not be able to create this project alone, I attempted to forge a path within the confines of the assignment. Having been in conversation with Sylvia and her research, and as a survival strategy, I asked her to collaborate on this project. We would eventually title it “Building Under Watch.” 

 

To describe the project simply: we developed a kind of game, build a house out of sticks by moving through the space undetected. But of course, there were layers to this, and logics that we imposed:  

 

First, the house could only be built if I traced a clockwise spiral through the studio, ending at the center. This movement would activate projections of each phase of a stick house being formed on the screens that wrapped three walls of the studio.  

 

Second, I could only continue along the spiral if I was not captured by a camera. Sylvia held the camera at the center of the room. She could rotate 360 degrees, tilt up and down, but her eyes were closed. Sylvia used a front facing phone camera, meaning I could see when I was caught. A third person, Anna, stood in the far corner of the room, up against the projector screen. Anna watched as I moved across the floor and shouted instructions for Sylvia to follow in attempts to capture me on camera: UP, DOWN!, LEFT, LEFT, LEFT, DOWN, UP, RIGHT! We experimented with these commands to slow down or speed up Sylvia’s reaction time, and to produce lag, or reduce it. 

 

A sonic layer served to signal how close I was to completing the stick house. The volume of static began very loud and decreased as I got closer to Sylvia and the center of the spiral. When I reached Sylvia, everything went quiet.  

 

Then, I would attempt to retrace the spiral, and unbuild the house, continuing to evade the lens of the camera held in her hand. 

 

If I was “caught” by the camera, I would have to start over. 

 

I had to start over many times.

 

In the conceptualizing of “Building Under Watch,” I found myself reflecting on my experiences of surveillance. Growing up, the color of my skin offered me some mobility and concealment within the surveillance-state. However, much of my young life in public spaces was experienced by my mother’s side. My mother is Mexican-American and has notably darker skin than I do. When we were in places like the grocery store, I experienced the extra eyes watching her as also watching me. I learned to operate the way my mom operated, even mirroring habits like making sure to get a receipt with every purchase in case security asked to check my bag to make sure I didn't steal anything. Objectively, because of the color of my skin, I am not surveilled in the way that my mom is, but because I grew up experiencing her world as my own, I grew up assuming security was watching me and assuming the worst of me, just like I saw them watch and judge my mom.  The heat of the inescapable spotlights in the studio activated this same hypervigilance that I have internalized from these moments of being watched. 

 

The task of producing a performance shifted this process of reflecting to an embodied practice. The performance essentially translated my reflections of the past into a gamified container that I could access in the present. Framed as a game, the stakes in my relationship with surveillance were dramatically lowered. In this new state of play, I was able to process through the complexity of my interactions with surveillance.

 

The repetitive nature of failing and starting over many times forced me to develop strategies that I could not have come up with while planning the performance. Going into it, I expected to have to move quickly, but generally not have to work too hard. But, as I moved through the space to achieve both of my goals: evading surveillance and building a stick house, the physical demand and unsustainability quickly became evident. I was breathing heavily, contorting my body, and becoming mentally fatigued.

 

At the beginning of the performance, I was entirely focused on the camera Sylvia was holding. Over time, I shifted my awareness from the object of the camera, to Sylvia's body and movements to anticipate the movement of the camera. When that strategy was still not working, I began paying attention to Anna’s directions, affording me two layers of anticipation for the direction of the camera. Becoming aware of the layered nature and humanness of the surveillance system increased the lag time and allowed me to work in anticipation.

 

What I learned in real time during the performance crystalized some nuance of fugitivity I was not able to connect to previously. The work of Macarena Gomez-Barris and Gloria Anzaldua have been formative, yet sometimes a little out of reach. Gomez-Barris’ construction of an extractive zone made sense to me. It gave me a frame to understand how the academy sometimes extractive-ly benefits from my work as a Chicana graduate student. My embodied experience of negotiating an ethnic identity made sense in Anzaldua’s frame of mestizaje and borderland identity as both physical and ontological. 

 

The parts of the Latina Feminist critique that was out of reach for me, however, was the richness of opportunity and possibility that Gomez-Barris highlights with her concept of submerged perspectives, and Anzaldua celebrates through the concepts of nepantla and new mestiza consciousness as a source of hybridity and new ways forward. In my mestizaje, my resounding experience has often been one of exclusion, policed by white, Mexican and Mexican-American communities. This has limited me in recognizing and celebrating the knowledge that has emerged from existing in between these spaces.

 

The way Sylvia and I conducted the experiment of “Building Under Watch” revealed to me what’s possible when researching from submerged perspectives within the academy. Only through collaboration, was I able to acknowledge the high stakes and possibility for harm in research, and then source my embodied knowledge and history of creating hybridized ways of moving through space. This fugitive practice changed the way I showed up in research and changed the way I understand my relationship with my communities.