Mise-en-Scene
Mise-en-Scene appropriates the language of the gallery, video games, scientific experiment, and surveillance to examine how mediation functions both to facilitate acts of violence and to uphold the assertion of boundaries between cultural and political institutions of power. Entering the gallery (the “white cube,”) the viewer is presented with a sealed 8 x 8 x 8 foot room, a literal white cube. Inside the room a woman stands in darkness, wire electrodes issue from her legs and arms. She is surveilled by four closed circuit night vision cameras that feed her real-time infrared image to corresponding monitors imbedded in each of the outer walls. Under each monitor is a large red video game button. When a viewer presses one of the buttons a light turns on inside the box switching the video image from infrared to color. Consequentially an electric shock is administered to one of the performer’s limbs causing her muscles to seize from the jolt until the button is released/light is turned off.