Rear Window
Jon Friis & Mike Lawrie
Rear Window is a contemporary re-imagining of the 1954 Hitchcock film of the same name, which centres on the symbolic relationship of audience and screen that the protagonist has with the neighbouring apartment block. It seeks to explore the cinematic cliché in which outrageous acts - often violent or sexual - occur in the buildings across the street. The installation takes the form of a telescope, which has been placed in a location with a suitable view.
To the user it appears to be an ordinary telescope. However, the image seen through the eyepiece does not wholly coincide with what is seen by the naked eye. Utilizing augmented reality techniques, portions of the image are replaced. The windows of neighbouring buildings become silver screens presenting clips of classic Hollywood footage which will utilize the Rear Window cliché.
Due to the human tendency to perform repetitious acts unthinkingly, there is great intricacy and beauty in everyday actions and experiences which goes unseen. If anything, our technology mediated culture has only made this tendency worse, promoting multitasking and short attention spans. We seek to reverse this relationship, using technology to create experiences which simultaneously engage and interrupt our habitual responses to stimuli. We construct facsimiles of ordinary occurrences which bear uncanny resemblance to prior experiences of the viewer. However, the experience is visibly counterfeit, forcing conscious evaluation and drawing attention to what’s all too often dismissed.
In Rear Window, we have constructed one artificial experience from another: cinema. It seemed ironically fitting to do so as there are few cultural habits more strongly ingrained than Hollywood clichés. Removed from their original context and masqueraded as real events these clichés become strangely foreign and highly suitable for our purpose. Furthermore, their use provides some context for our own work, relating it to the familiar voyeuristic experience of cinema.