Concept and work by Pegah Tabassinejad
Monitoring [Tehran] is a multi channel interactive video installation of a durational performance for Skype. Some Tehran dwellers are online at their home, whether performing or simply doing their everyday life activities. Walls of their private interiors had been removed and replaced by the windows of Skype, as they are being watched in their private space
. This live installation is an attempt between the public and the private place within what we might call aesthetic surveillance. The extraordinary popularity of websites devoted to voluntary public exposure ratifies the impulse toward private performances. No one could have foreseen, however, the fateful dance between voluntary and involuntary acting for the camera as symbolized by Reality TV and surveillance. Many of the psycho-social phenomena (such as celebrities; lust for privacy; fears of intimacy; cultural narcism) are reflected in the mega-success of television shows that cast real people in all manner of situations. In these realms (which are actually anything but 'real'), people voluntarily allow themselves to be taped both openly and surreptitiously. Surveillance becomes performance and vice versa. Monitoring [Tehran] shifts the public space to an intimate private one where the viewers are exposed to the private worlds of others that are revealed to them through many windows. The presence of these Tehran dwellers is mediated through the lens of the laptops’ cameras at the gaze of their viewers. The viewers then, are watching what might be in between the virtual and the real while exploring the absence within the two worlds! The question remains: How can we suggest our real presence?
