My Name is Scot
The Storyteller, 2024
The Storyteller is a mimetic surveillance device, a prop; life-size, fabricated almost entirely out of wood and from a technological standpoint, completely inoperable. Sculpted from local Cedar and Fir, it purposely eschews the sleek, sexy materiality of most digital devices, the rustic, hand-built aesthetic serving both as a rebuttal of the pervasive integration of technological devices in our daily lives and a challenge to the seemingly imperative power structures that they betoken.
With The Storyteller, you are your own subject, you can only surveille yourself; under the blind gaze of the device, you are responsible for scripting your own role, documenting your own actions, analyzing your own intentions and, if you are being observed by someone else, it’s because they are in the same space with you, and if you want to, you can watch them right back. If the moment is to be retrieved, remembered or re-told, it will be person to person, but shared knowingly, and hopefully with consent. Unless of course somebody comes along, captures it on their cell phone and uploads it to Tik Tok…
The device extends the notion of the ‘panoptic sort’ into a participatory exploration of social mobility and self-governance, providing viewers with an opportunity to consider the choices they make when they enlist or engage with the structures, emotions, and social contracts of a scrutinized architectural or informational environment. When observing a surveillance device that is not actually looking back at them, I want viewers to remember that people come up with the coding, people tweak the algorithms and enact or suspend privacy laws, people built the ‘built environment’, installed the CCTV and we, the people, with a little help from our AI friends, ultimately decide how to surveille ourselves.
While The Storyteller addresses serious issues, I’m also interested in poking fun at our technological expectations and encouraging an absurdist or humorous act of public engagement. The fact that the faux CCTV camera doesn’t ‘work’ in the same way that the object it represents does, makes it a potential device for irreverent dissent, playful defiance or performative imagining. The realization that they are not being monitored may inspire viewers to reconsider or reinvent their public persona and perhaps, even feel assured enough to share aspects of their self in a meaningful way. The device ultimately hopes to help transform public space from territories of conditioned responses, monitored behaviours and scripted interactions into places of potential, wonder and freedom.
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My Name Is Scot is a Vancouver-based artist interested in notions of agency, identity and authenticity. Their work has been seen in exhibitions, screenings and performances in over 30 countries. Their texts have been published in The Capilano Review, Geist, Front Magazine, Geez, Dumbo Press and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Recent work includes Comfort Zone @ Bothkinds Project Space, Vancouver, Mediating Heterogeneity, Chiao-Tung Campus, Hsinchu City, Taiwan and Data Migration @ One Minute Volume 11@ Contemporary Art Rhur, Berlin, Germany.