Julia Scher Always There

Julia Scher's work explores issues related to electronic security. Using all sorts of surveillance gear, she constructs temporary, transitory installations and performances in which she captures data and then crunches, alters, and retransmits it, deliberately using and misusing it, and demonstrating its awesome power to exercise social control. Through her simulated monitoring systems she hopes to expose the dangers and ideologies inherent in a contemporary practice that we rarely question, or even think about. Artist Statement: I originally saw surveillance in terms of looking at landscape, because indeed there was the landscape through the lens or eye of a camera rather than my own eye. I don't, however, agree that space is the battleground. More insidious and less visible to the human eye is identity, created through multiple data bases and hierarchies imposed and created without laws or the knowledge of those being judged. These virtual spaces are far more interesting for me and far more dangerous. At least you can see actual space. Virtual space is another ruse, because our virtual identities have to be created before we can pass through a virtual space. What kinds of hierarchies are going to be employed to keep us in or out of those virtual spaces? I can penetrate those walls without being a physical presence. I'm interested in the extremity of this battleground.