Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
The View Within
The Window as a Frame for Exposing Surveillance Architectures Within the Home
Window to the World Within. Mula, F. Unit 18. 2021.
Fathima Mula
MArch 2021Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Naadira Patel
Unit Leader: Sarah de Villiers
Unit Assistant: Nothando Lunga
UNIT 18︎︎︎
Hyperreal Prototypes: Supersurfaces
Project Website
Click Here
This MDP aims at using the home and its architecture to reveal how the practice of surveillance penetrates even the most private of spaces. Sited within the South African Indian household, the work uses the ‘window’ as a critical device to examine the various levels and sources of surveillance within domestic space.
Beatriz Colomina likens the window to a “screen”, calling it “a viewing mechanism that produces the subject”. The work sees the window as a super-surface within space that, when interacted with, produces a particular dynamic between audience and subject. Here, the window takes on many more forms and functions, which include the screen, the camera, and the mirror – to try and make visible the mechanisms of power, control, and the perceived gaze as they exert themselves on bodies in space within the home.
The project proposes an AR space that allows the women of the home to access an archive of views which frame themselves as the subject. Here the user can access, augment, conceal, and otherwise manipulate the views into their home, thus altering the way they are perceived. This speculative space becomes a tool to initiate awareness around gendered practices within the South African Indian home.
Beatriz Colomina likens the window to a “screen”, calling it “a viewing mechanism that produces the subject”. The work sees the window as a super-surface within space that, when interacted with, produces a particular dynamic between audience and subject. Here, the window takes on many more forms and functions, which include the screen, the camera, and the mirror – to try and make visible the mechanisms of power, control, and the perceived gaze as they exert themselves on bodies in space within the home.
The project proposes an AR space that allows the women of the home to access an archive of views which frame themselves as the subject. Here the user can access, augment, conceal, and otherwise manipulate the views into their home, thus altering the way they are perceived. This speculative space becomes a tool to initiate awareness around gendered practices within the South African Indian home.
Keywords:
Window, Surveillance, Home, Technology, Power and The Gaze, Mirror, Privacy, Control
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