Digital Other (Media for Installation)

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20289770

Digital Other is a combination video art project and thesis paper that addresses the problems of encountering others and mediating oneself through the digital screen. The project explores issues of control and surveillance through an investigation of my own experience as user and voyeur but also suggests that these issues haunt the structure of my subjectivity regardless of screen mediation. In the video, my entangled relation to a ghostly black and vaguely female Other on a screen suggests a power dynamic that plays out in my own self-mediation- a process that uses the Other without ever understanding her difference from me. This Other robs me of fingers, teeth, and eyes across the distance of screen mediation and thereby displays her power over me even as I surveil her. The art piece itself is an installation that parallels the content of the media: the media plays on the same monitor, on the same wooden table, and in front of the same black office chair. This set up suggests the specificity of my own engagement with the Other, while opening up to the possibility -- but not necessity -- that viewers have the same experience.