Keenan discusses the functional role of windows both in relation to individual and to space in Window’s of vulnerability. His argument can be mapped as an exploration of the window as an agent that divides humans into individuals and subjects, and space into public and private:
“The window implies a theory of the human subject as a theory of politics and the subjects variable status as public or private individual is defined by its position relative to this window... Behind it the individual is a knowing – that is seeing and theorizing – subject. In front of it on the street for instance, the subject assumes public rights and responsibilities, appears, acts, intervenes, in the sphere it shares with other subjects”(132).
Just as the window changed the architecture of society, he contends that television’s architecture mimics the window and provides a “view unto the world”, acting as a “third window”. The television does not just facilitate the human gaze outwards but also glares back at the viewer(1) imitating the “glare of publicity”. Television, for Keenan occupies an ambivalent space in society at once a “breach” that intrudes upon the private space of the home/office, and one that permits us to glance to a distance, collapsing traditional spatial boundaries of inside and outside.
Liz Canner’s new media project, Symphony of a City (henceforth SC), much like the complicates, even breaches, the spatial distinctions created by windows and TV. SC gave four pairs of camera eye glasses to Boston citizens nominated by the community at large. For a selected twenty-four hours each nominee donned the camera glasses and recorded their normal daily experiences that were broadcasted in real time on the walls of city hall in a square which contained the four different perspectives.
SC recreates the three windows within the public space, simultaneously layering these distinctions of subject, object, private and public: “publicity tears us from ourselves, exposes us to and involves us with others, denies us the security of that window which we might install ourselves to gaze”(134). In the public, one becomes a subject of those viewers installed at the window. In SC the public becomes the space that the subject installs him or her self to gaze onto others (the media installation), while also being subjects of the gaze of others. To further complicate this relationship, the public gazes onto a media screens that displays the gazes of the project participants who rove between public and private spaces.
Via his example the Los Angeles house architectural manifestation of the human eye, Keenan postulates the risk that would be incurred if the aperture of the gaze becomes uncontrollable: “the opening risks the more violent opening of the distinction between inside and outside, private and public, self and other…”(124) This question underlies Liz Canners media project Symphony of a City whereby the camera serves as stint of the gazes of four individuals to the view of the public.
Canner’s project demonstrates how the fixed aperture of the camera, acts as Keenan’s window and divides humans into subject and object, while media projections can act as windows which separate public and private spaces.
The television implants a need to reconsider the politics of private and public spheres. The TV, “implies a radical reorientation of our conventional categories of space and time, inside and outside, now and then”, argues Keenan one that dissolves the public sphere so that it is “structurally elsewhere…defined by its resistance to being made present”(135). Visibility and access become a central theme in understanding
SC opens up a glimpse into a larger political problem and directs the gaze of the public to political tension between public and private distinctions. The project attempted to objectively elucidate the city’s community housing problem through the juxtaposition of four distinct points of view (literally reproducing the POV). The housing problem itself was a matter of public housing being appropriated by private landowners, increasing homelessness.
The projected video light on the side of City Hall light did not render the interior of city hall visible but collided with its closed edifice. This collision exposed a contradiction in the concept of private versus public. The building represents a public space wherein decisions are made that directly impact the public. However the building’s austere presence prevents transparency that a public space should ideally engender. SC’s projected window (media installation) directly a gaze into the life (both private and public) of citizens, and challenges the enclosed private space of Boston’s politics that masquerades as public. The public has access into a understanding of the housing problem, and forces the politicians to consider the crisis with new eyes.
Canners project embodies a reversal of the television. Instead of resisting visibility, it is making itself visible to the public. SC challenges issues of temporality and space; the idea that TV has become a window “to somewhere and somewhen else”(134) by making the broadcast, here (in Boston community), and now (streaming in real time). The project also challenges the hegemonic power of television as agent “with the power to convince millions” by controlling what the views are broadcast via the TV. SC projects issues regarding the home and private/public space onto a political building literally knocking on its door making the politicians open up to examine the issues at hand. In SC the power of the TV is leveraged to make visible and urgent political problems.
