Category: CCTV

Room of Screens

Faye Rose Mcdool / / CCTV, Performance process, Rooms, Technical

We have decided to allocate the CCTV room as the room of screens. In here, we will place all the Night filming footage with the recorded narratives played screens scattered around on the desk, book case and tables with the large TV screen showing the live CCTV  split 9 screen . Each screen will be allocated a different room from the filming with head phones attached to some devices and speakers to others. When the audience enter the room, it shall be blacked out with no natural light leaking in and only the light pollution from the computer, laptop and IPad screens.

For the narratives for the night filming footage, we have decided to base it on feminism and edit the original text which were written in the researched books. I have chosen to write the text for the Bedroom, Cot Room angle 2 and the Waiting Room. However, for the waiting room, as the images is so strong, I have decided to leave it silent without any text but with a strong static sound. The narratives for the other two rooms read:

Bedroom

Lying like this, I felt as if I had become part of the fabric around me, absorbed into the earth like a dead woman I had no individual existence. At that moment, I suddenly felt as if I had connected heaven and earth like a bridge. By trial and error I had found the position that enabled me to exist fully in that particular space. ((original text from: Oida, Yoshi. Marshall, Lorna 1997, The Invisible Actor. Cox & Wyman, Reading Berkshire))

Cot Room 2nd angle/Half and Half Face

Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eye was looking through me? And it is this which frightens me as the interior. Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you. ((original text from: Rattray, David 1993 How I Became Invisible , Semiotext,U.S.: Central Bks))

The ordering of the clips depends on the audience and which video/screen they are attracted to first. The sounds on the video will be played into headphones and speakers on which the narrative printed out and placed near the screen so they can read the text also. The audience members will not be able to hear any noise pollution from outside and from the rest of the house.

The Aesthetics of the Piece.

Lauren Hughes / / CCTV, Documentation, Performance process, Research

Discussing Fiona Templeton in my previous Blog post and how the performance Recognition influenced the idea of us being in the house through Multimedia on alternate performance evenings, we decided to do this through creating an installation piece with us videoed in and around the house. This meant we only needed one of us for each performance evening (solving the Health and Safety issues) to set up and man the equipment, which worked to our advantage as we still got to see the audiences reactions to our work.

The Invisible Man is a story based around a character and how he refers to himself as The Invisible Man as people refuse to acknowledge his presence due to the fact he is black. We chose to expand on this idea of feeling invisible and apply it to the house, however given the obvious fact we were a group of females we took the theme and alternated it to a feminism. Through this we decided to do filming after dark with torches lighting up each room in the house and see what affects this would create. We chose have a soundscape over this for example someone making a cup of tea in the kitchen, a news reel in the living room, brushing of teeth when a torch is shone from those rooms making them rooms come alive with the sounds. As well as this another layer of sound with our voices reading extracts from The Invisible Man narrating the piece.

When filming the rooms within the house at night, each room spoke its own aesthetic narrative. The footage had a layer of fuzz creating a grainy affect over it due to the resolution in the dark. With this totally new visual in the dark we decided the narrative idea could be taken so much further that the soundscape and torches idea wasn’t as necessary and focused on the aesthetics of the piece. In this we will give the audience a pair of headphones with our voices relaying a narrative to them while they absorb the imagery on the TV screen, some will be existing texts that complement the visuals and others will be our own pieces of writing. We decided to take 3 shots each and watch them repeatedly and simply write what we saw and felt.

“You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that your part of all the sound and anguish” ((Ellison, Ralph (1965) The Invisible Man, Great Britain: Penguin Books Ltd.)) This is taken from The Invisible Man, with so in depth descriptions of personal emotion we decided to still incorporate this as it sparked the idea as a whole and with most the imagery showing a shadow,

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Image by Lauren Hughes (2013)

silhouette

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Image by Lauren Hughes (2013)

or distorted face

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Image by Lauren Hughes (2013)

it linked in with that idea of having no identity, relating back to the title and also just giving that idea of feeling invisible and alone.

 

Safe house – definition; “a house in a secret location, used by spies or criminals in hiding” ((http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/safe%2Bhouse?q=safe+house Accessed; 25/03/13)), or “a house where someone can hide or shelter” ((http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/safe-house?q=safe+house, Accessed; 25/03.13)). The fact that when people are taken to a safe house they have their identity taken all links in with our contribution to the final performance. Also with the definition including shelter we did filming in other people’s homes to see what their definition of a home was, whether it’s the place or people etc. which we were going  to use within our piece before we came across The Invisible Man.

After recording the rooms at night we decided to have the CCTV room as the ‘room of screens’, with adding narratives to the videos, playing on a low volume when the audience enter filling the atmosphere with the ghostly whispers from the narratives. This project we decided to develop meant splitting the 1 minute clips of each room between us with 3 each sitting and watching these over and over…. And over again, we did this so the imagery could speak to us, even after watching one for 30 times unbelievably you would see something new or create a whole new narrative in your mind from these images. Giving that the three of us were female after reading the Invisible Man we chose to take the aspect of being invisible due to his ethnicity and use it through feminism and identity. Choosing to do so linked in really well with the Safe House which is all about identity.

Deciding to call the piece Safe House portrayed the essence of our piece as well as triggering ideas to enhance the feel of a Safe House, a safe homely feel, but also the authoritative aspects for example the agents, rules and regulations. “To start with, the dwelling space must give the impression of seclusion. If it is the task of the house to provide a refuge from the outside world, this must also find expression in the nature of the dwelling space” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 143)). A typical home for most of us is this way inclined and this is what the Safe House has… to a certain extent. The magic of our room being the last visited is for the audience to have explored the house knowing, but most likely forgetting for the majority of the piece that they are being watched, taking that idea of being secluded and keeping the private the private within a home is flipped on it’s head when they discover the CCTV screen.

When first hearing the term ‘Safe House’ I instantly envisaged films with characters being whisked away to a house in the country. However when researching into them it’s not all about the authorities keeping civilians safe, Safe Houses can be used to protect women who have been abused, foster children or hide illegal immigrants etc. When discovering the safe houses for women it linked in with our performance ideas, although our installation piece isn’t about being physically abused it still has that essence of oppression which is emphasised through the haunting atmosphere that fills the room when all the clips are playing in sync.

Watching you, watching me

Elizabeth Soper / / CCTV, Performance process, Rooms

“Lone Twin negotiate not only their relationship with each other but also, more importantly, their relation with other people.” ((Williams, David and Carl Lavery (2011) Good Luck Everybody: Lone Twin: Journeys, Performances, Conversations, Wales: Cambrian Printers, p.69))

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www.lonetwin.com

 

The audience and the performer have very different roles. In theatre the audience come to watch a performance and to be entertained in a friendly and safe environment. In site specific performance, the roles are the same, yet the environment will be different depending on the chosen site. ‘Safe House’ is in an interesting site to perform in, and isn’t the most welcoming house to invite the audience into. They won’t know what to expect and they will be interacting with the performers which generally in theatre, wouldn’t happen. “Rather than simply occupying an ‘ususual setting’, site-specific performance is adjudged to hold ‘possibilities for responding to and interrogating a range of current spatial concerns..” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, p.8))

Although our audience is coming to watch a performance, the idea of them being watched will be present as they will notice and be aware that there are CCTV cameras in each room. This questions who is doing the watching and who is being watched; the audience or the performer.

“Here the term ‘house’ is to be understood in a general sense as any closed individual area beyond the body, in which man can remain and move with safety.” ((Bollnow, O.F. (2011) Human Space, London: Hyphen Press, p.267)) Thinking about this, I have decided to experiment with this whole concept in my performance in the kitchen. I would like the audiences experience in the kitchen to be different from any other room in the house, and to go away with different reactions to it. Perhaps trying various performances on my audience will create a whole new reaction, one performance idea being me watching my audience.

Having a television playing a film of the adventures I have had as a rabbit is quite humorous, and will draw the audience in. But perhaps instead of interacting with my audience, I could just ignore them. Standing quietly in the corner gives a different feel to the room completely, as it contrasts to the humour and makes them aware that they are the ones being watched. Me watching them watching me on the television is particularly interesting, and will be fascinating to see the reactions I then get from them.

“if you dress up funny…people will shout at you” ((Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making a Performance, Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, London: Routledge, p.125))

Another performance technique I could experiment with is discussing with the audience the reactions I have received, using what people have said as verbatim to tell others: “Moreover, in some examples of verbatim theatre the performers also incorporate elements of their own lives into the production, employing a self-reflective mode.” ((Haedicke, Susan (2009) Political Performances: Theory and Practice, New York: Columbia University, p.115))

Having filmed in different places in the bunny costumes I have met different people with a variety of reactions to me. Whatever reaction I get will be written down or recorded, and this can be used as conversation in my performance. This will create a different reaction all together from the previous performance idea as I will be verbally interacting with my audience in the bunny costume, which again brings humour and absurdity to be having a civilized conversation in a kitchen with a giant rabbit.

Lone Twins, ‘To The Dogs’, is a good example of a piece of their work that gradually built and expanded as it was carried out. Gregg and Gary cycled two folding bicycles through Brussels, Belgium for 24 days and ended each day by putting on a short performance at the Kunsten Festival des Arts retelling the events of that day.  The experiences they had built up over this period of time and each performance expanded as they experienced more things, interacted with more people and witnessed various different places: “The interest is in how those small moments, each five minutes long, will change over time as they become situated in the growing, differing contexts of each other.” ((Williams, David and Carl Lavery (2011) Good Luck Everybody: Lone Twin: Journeys, Performances, Conversations, Wales: Cambrian Printers, p.69))

Becoming Invisible: CCTV but in a new light

Faye Rose Mcdool / / CCTV, Performance process, Research

We enjoyed the idea of revealing a message, however, we thought we could be more creative with this take more advantage of using the CCTV during different times during the day. The title of the Site Specific piece is ‘Safe House’ so we began to question two people where they are most comfortable in their house/flat student accommodation.

We questioned this because, like in the Safe House, we are not permanent residents but we are simply there temporarily and can get attached to one room. Like the two on the video getting attached with their bedrooms, we are most comfortable in the CCTV room as that is where we spend most of our time during rehearsals.

From getting this information, we wanted to challenge the meaning of Safe House and making the audience feel uncomfortable when watching our pre-recorded footage. The definition of Safe House is “a dwelling or building whose conventional appearance makes it a safe or inconspicuous place for hiding, taking refuge, or carrying on clandestine activities.” ((Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer IEEE: Dictionary.com, “safe house,” in Collins English Dictionary – Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Source location: HarperCollins Publishers.http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/safe house. Available:http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: March 26, 2013)) . We wanted to take the aspect of hiding in the house so we have played around with using darkness with the CCTV. To do this, we film inside the house at night time. Doing this was interesting because we all of a sudden felt a sense of fear of going through the house just because of the darkness and due to being unfamiliar with the other rooms. Over the top of the recordings, we have found quotes for various books to describe the thoughts and feeling of being invisible in the darkness.

We looked at “The Invisible Man” By Ralph Ellison which expresses the thoughts and feelings of an African man in society and how he feels invisible compared to the rest of his society in the twentieth century.  “I am a man of substance of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids” ((Ellison, Ralph, 1947 The Invisible Man,  Penguin Books, New York p7)) . Using this would link wonderfully without CCTV recordings as you can see a silhouette of a body during the footage but only when the body is moving or light shone on them you notive there is a human there. We looked at other books to find this sense of hiding and invisibility:

  • The Invisible actor By Yoshi Oida & Lorna Marshall ((Oida, Yoshi. Marshall, Lorna 1997, The Invisible Actor. Cox & Wyman, Reading Berkshire))
  • How I Became Invisible By David Rattray ((Rattray, David 1993 How I Became Invisible , Semiotext,U.S.: Central Bks))

Among quotes from these texts, we created our own words to record and say over the footage for the final edit for the video to create a narrative. We edited the text also to focus it on feminist views instead so we could connect more with the text we had found and going to write.

When creating this, I also realised how much in common it has with my own work of Liminal, Compact and Ignored spaces and the sense of hiding but wanted to be seen in the space. Because of this, I have decided to place some of this work in the CCTV room on the cord board along with the pre-recorded CCTV video.

Things that go bump in the dark.

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Documentation, Performance process, Research, Rooms

For our final piece the CCTV group decided to create a piece of installation art using the fascinating piece of equipment at our disposal. Marita Sturken states that “An installation both defines and contains space, situating, if not controlling the viewer within it.” (( Erika Suderburg (2000) Space, Site, Intervention: situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. P. 287 ))  The idea for our piece was that while in the CCTV room the audience would be able to experience every other room in the house, placing them in a position where they could understand the format and use of the space in a way that they had not experienced it in the rest of the performance. Seeing as all of the rooms were occupied during the performance we decided to see what it would be like for the rooms to be captured with very few signs of life, and once we realised the potential that this emptiness created we decided to stick with it.

Full screen night filming by Lizzy Hayes, Lauren Hughes, Faye Mcdool
Seeing the rooms from a different perspective reminded me of Bollnows Human Spaces (2011) and how different each of our safe house rooms were from the definitions and purposes he proposed. Bollnow states that the furnishings and furniture play a part in the aura of a room and that “bare, empty rooms have a chilling effect” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 144)) and that “disorder and neglect have a quieting effect” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 144)) and due to the empty and neglected state the house was in it was easy to agree with him.
The emptiness and neglected state of the house became emphasised in the dark state that we filmed in.

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Image by Jozey Wade 2013

The cot room (above) had a chilling, spooky quality to it that does not represent home, even in the day light. As many of the ‘residents’ have mentioned, we doubt that the room would feel that bad if it wasn’t for the presence of the cot itself. But I think it was key for us to remember when filming was that the room was made to feel so unsettling on purpose. The true nurturing purpose of a child’s nursery is lost in a sort of dark translation in the house due its requirements for training and we were able to use that to our advantage when filming, making the images we captured as uncomfortable as the actor being filmed felt.

Installation piece- Cot Room By Lizzy Hayes, Lauren Hughs, Faye Mcdool

Other spaces that in the day time might not be pleasant, but had never been scary, transformed beyond what I imagined they would. The kitchen became colder and harsher and the introduction of a spot light to the living room gave the opposite effect to the warmth that we expected.
Instead of just filming the bare rooms we had one of us walk through or occupy the space in a minimalistic manner. Bollnow suggested that  “the dwelling becomes an impression of the individual who dwells in it” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 145)) and I think that in capturing snippets of life in each room we were in effect stating that the people who were seen are not permanent residents, but are instead shadows passing through. These hints of movement acted as suggestions of life in an otherwise still setting. Without realising it I think we created something very much like Gary Hills installation piece, The Viewer, which I talked about in a previous post, in that the person seen in each image was not there to be interacted with or to portray a character, but were there to prove their existence.
The final result of this nights filming was nine separate one minute clips of footage, each representing one room and containing a different movement at a different time.