Yu Sang | Public Voyeurism: Confronting Domestic Violence in Cyberspace

 
Public Voyeurism: Confronting Domestic Violence in Cyberspace is an interactive video installation that demonstrates the complexity of public-domestic relationships in media events about domestic violence. Netizens’ collective power pushes domestic violence to be an openly discussed social issue. However, with domestic violence being a spectacle in cyberspace, the motivation and emotion behind individual netizens are no longer straightforward. Finding the truth and promoting justice, or curiosity, obsession, voyeurism, and even paranoia, what is behind the netizen’s engagement with media events about domestic violence? What will happen when thousands of people try to get closer to the core of the events. Through illustrating these questions, my project demonstrates a refusal to ignore or flatten the public-domestic relationships and the unarticulated emotions when viewing acts of violence, or what we might call “public voyeurism.”
In this project, I create two sequential videos about domestic violence in media events and display them on a screen equipped with facial recognition and a distance sensor. The screen will be placed at the end of a dim corridor. The audience will be given directions to walk along the corridor and trigger the sensor in a visible line marked on the floor. When the audience crosses the line, the sensor detects them, triggering the video to shift. The first video uses snapshots, audio, pictures, and comments about domestic violence on social media platforms. The video conveys the sense of fragmentary, plausible, and overwhelming, reflecting the media environment that we are experiencing. When the audience sees the first video from a distance, they will be naturally attracted to get closer to the screen and see the video. The second video is more fictional and emotional. When the audience crosses the line, it will replace the first one. In the second video, I repeatedly use eyes as metaphors, mediate images by television and camera, and adopt the dramatized background music to demonstrate the unstable boundaries between public and private, participation and voyeurism. Finally, when the audience gets extremely close to the screen, the video will entirely disappear, leaving them with a black screen in an empty corridor.
The whole viewing process makes the tension between netizens’ positionality and the video content explicitly, through which I want the audience to reflect on their positionality on social media platforms and their emotions when confronting domestic violence. Along with the approach of domestic violence, the identities of netizens shift between bystanders, helpers, and voyeurs and become much more intricate. That is what we are experiencing but ignored in the publicized domestic violence.