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Camera Opera : [Video installation]

Camera Opera explores the ‘live’ construction of history through the devices of television broadcast media. Filmed on the set of a well-known German current affairs programme with the collaboration of the studio’s production team, the video installation confronts us with the fictional mise-en-scène through which we access ‘reality’. The work’s significance lies in the way in which it exposes the media’s construction of experience through the spectacle and redefines the boundaries between presence and mediation. Camera Opera was commissioned by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal for a solo exhibition of my recent works with a monograph catalogue (additional funding, Canada Council for the Arts). Further exhibitions include Montehermoso Cultural Centre, Spain and Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London. What is original in Camera Opera is the reversal of the role of the cameras in conventional news broadcasting. The cameras turn on themselves; they become the subject, and the performance of filming becomes the action. From inside the sound booth, I directed five camera operators through a series of choreographed movements around the silent figure of the anchorwoman. During the filming Strauss waltzes were piped into the studio to guide the operators' movements in a carefully controlled choreography. Through this mechanized choreography, I effectively substitute the camera for the news script, exposing them as both vehicle and subject.

The work's methodology is predicated on analyses of the mechanisms at play within the spaces of the production of knowledge. Engaging the Brechtian techniques of alienation and by staging an exaggerated choreography of images, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the systems of representation evoked by ‘performing’ the news. What we are given to see is how the space is organized through and by the camera lens, how the set itself becomes a performative space based on a set of codified power relations.