Jill French – Potential Intrusion 2012

 

This current practice has been influenced by the changing concepts of privacy and intrusion. Making case study investigations into areas where social behaviours of the Metaverse have dissonantly translated into non-virtual communications. It seeks to test established social boundaries, often resulting in what could be seen or felt, but not defined as intrusion.

 

The artist negotiates the potential of intrusion through performative gestures in two contrasting ways.  The first method involves scouting homes and apartment buildings in order to take long exposure photographs through openings capturing fragmented, obscure details from inside. In some instances she inserted long exposure cameras into residential elevators. To the residents these could present the possible threat of having their image disseminated with signifying data. The images would never capture people or any signifying information, and never physically cross any threshold but they have the potential to do so in the minds of the residents, or in the assembling and display of information.

 

The second method negotiates the boundaries of intrusion in a more intimate way. The artist persuades strangers to allow her in to photograph their living rooms. She engages them in conversation and attempts to persuade them to allow her to take their portrait, whilst covertly sound recording the process. The performances were wrought with the tension of a possible physical threat to both the resident and artist and also with the stressing and confusion of social etiquette and boundaries within the situation.

 

The potential of the intrusion is uncertain through these acts and can only be discernable through the tentative assembling and obscuring of documentation. The viewer may become implicated in the process by the ways they cognitively read and construct the information and by their desire to do so.