Rear Window

Installation, 2001
Rear Window is an interactive 2-channel video installation that is viewed from a window outside. Inside the video is projected on a large screen and a camera is directed toward the window. 

The video switches back and forth between a clip of Hitchcock's famous "Rear Window"* and live video of viewers watching the projection in the window.

In the clip of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" the original crime scene is replaced by real-time video of the installation's window. The audience is 'framed' in the context of the fictional constructed image and the window becomes a stage.

Looking, looking back, being looked at and looking at oneself looking. 

The scenes interact following the logic of cinematic continuity: the actors look at the viewer, and the viewer looks back at the actors. But the usual voyeuristic mechanism is reversed and the viewer's passive role of voyeur is interrupted when the viewer becomes both the object and the subject of the gaze.
This project took place at White Box Gallery in Chelsea in NYC in the summer of 2001.


*) Hitchcock's Rear Window is a study of voyeurism. The look is central to the plot. In the movie the observant protagonist (James Stewart) is a bored, wheel chair bound photographer who obsessively watches his neighbors through his back window. As the plot unfolds, Stewart believes he has witnessed a murder. His girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, becomes drawn into the speculation as the two try to unravel the mystery. Until the very end we are not sure if a crime is committed or if it is a construct of the imagination.

View Rear Window here.