I have been avoiding making this piece.
As an exploration of self-consciousness and self-criticism as a form of vanity, I forced myself to sit in front of my webcam for a full hour. This activity created a documentation of my own interaction with my digital reflection. The film captures every glare, every flinch, and every tweak I made throughout the duration of the private performance.
In the very painful process of sitting alone, in silence, with only the sight of my reflection to occupy me, I discovered a few curious happenings. I would forget the relationship between my tangible body and the person on the screen. On occasion, I would look down at my arms or legs and suddenly be shocked to realize that they were there. It was almost dizzying to reassociate myself with the figure on the computer screen. I would have guessed it would be the other way around, but my reflection became me.
Upon reviewing the film, I found my first instinct was to scrap it. My inclination was to criticize my appearance rather than the film itself. I thought to myself, "my hair looks bad there", "my arms don't look right", or most frequently, "I took off my glasses to look better and just ended up squinting the whole! How stupid could I be?". My instinct was to re-do it so that I would look better. I caught myself in the process of having these thoughts and realized that I was only reaffirming my original justification for making this piece.
I conceived this piece as both a personal expression of self-conscious troubles as well as a public exploration of our relationship to our visual selves. I see this as a study of traditional body image issues while also considering the element of our online self-image. The piece exists both as an online film and as an element of an installation. The piece is intended to be viewed on a computer monitor, just as it was created.
This has turned out to be one of the more difficult and personal things I have ever done in my work, and yet the product is so simple.
[Still images from film]
