Dolores from 10 to 10
Performance, a field of inquiry that pays particular attention to the body as a signifying entity as well as physical matter, enables us to trace different modalities of corporeal representation pointing to the ways in which symbolic, digital, and material conditions inform each other. How does new media challenge our understanding of representation, presence, and "liveness," a factor that some scholars such as Peggy Phelan (Unmarked. The Politics of Performance) signal as the core political value of performance? How do artists explore different forms of spectatorship in new media in order to address new systems of subjugation?
Coco Fusco's net-performance, Dolores from 10 to 10, engages the digital as a visual medium. Transmitted through webcams and surveillance monitors, Fusco's performance offers a representation of the bodies that are not shown online: the bodies of those who assemble our machines. In this 2001 webcast performance, Fusco reenacted the story of Delfina Rodriguez, a maquiladora or assembly line worker she met in 1998. Rodriguez's boss held her hostage for 12 hours in an attempt to force her to resign. The worker later sued the company but, according to the court, she was not able to prove that she had been restrained in the workplace. The factory management claimed that inspecting Rodriguez's personal belongings they found unionizing pamphlets that posed a threat to the factory, which prompted them to fire her.
When Fusco learned about this case, the artist speculated that surveillance recordings from the closed circuit TV systems that are generally used to monitor employees would have played a vital role in supporting the worker's claim. However, no surveillance recordings were entered as evidence in the trial, and because there was no ransom demand, the judge dismissed the case. Fusco conceived Dolores from 10 to 10 as "a story that no one saw."
Dolores from 10 to 10 presents the hyperexposure of workers under the 24/7 vigilance of Closed Circuit TV as a condition of the workers' disappearance and invisibility. The performance shows that surveillance in the workplace fulfills a function opposite to that of street surveillance. While surveillance systems in the street turn people's private whereabouts into public matter, in production and manufacturing sites, cameras expose workers to a close monitoring that alienates them from the outside world. In this sense, the use of surveillance systems in the workplace resembles the function of the penitentiary panopticon, as commented upon by Foucault.
Fusco's twelve-hour live streaming video performance was launched on November 22 of 2001, from Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Helsinki, Finland, and simultaneously broadcast as part of different cultural events in Los Angeles, London, and Ljubljana.
Four cameras recount the situations endured by Dolores, the worker, from four different viewpoints. Like blinking, rotating eyes, the cameras take turns in a surveillance round that offers brief black and white static views of the room in which Dolores is locked. The position of the cameras, generally shooting from above, and the absence of sound allow for the viewer to focus on the characters' gestures, body language, and proxemics, that is, on the distance between the performers.
In Dolores from 10 to 10, Fusco denounces the unrestricted invasiveness of surveillance cameras in the workplace as a blatant form of subjugation. In contrast to the way in which surveillance footage functions when released on TV or on the Net without the consent of surveilled people, this performatic reshaping of surveillance constitutes Fusco's response to the worker's claim in court. Fusco's performance, which she presents as "an enabling fiction" (161), restores visibility in favor of the worker. She thereby offers the maquila worker an alternate position from which to participate in the field of vision.
What happens when a Closed Circuit TV system is wired to reach the Internet, and audience reception is networked to allow for interactivity? What changes when surveillance images of factory workers are broadcast as webcam material? As a docu-drama, a performance based on a real life episode, Dolores not only tells the story of the maquila worker but it also examines the particular positioning of spectators in relation to what they see. The piece reconnects viewers to streamed images, inviting them to become responsible spectators, in an ethical move from voyeurism to witnessing. These constitute two very distinct forms of spectatorship: Whereas "voyeurism" keeps the object separate from the subject that takes pleasure in watching, "witnessing" demands active spectators who take responsibility in relation to what they see. Dolores as a webcam performance challenges the distance between that which is exposed or revealed and remote viewing subjects. Through the very mechanism that she critiques, Fusco presents the way in which gender, class, and globalism inform the practice of surveillance. The maquiladora system is the expression of the unequal distribution of labor in a global economy. Within this system, certain bodies and their labor are made invisible, with clear consequences for the rights and protections to which they can lay claim.
In submitting what "no one saw" to a shared viewing, Fusco intervenes in the logic of surveillance and voyeurism online to comment on the ethos of digital spectatorship. Rather than create images for a watcher—security guards, voyeurs—Fusco aims to create witnesses for images of transnational capital exploitation, reinstating the "unseen" for global spectators. In an interview published in The Drama Review, Fusco asks if we can use the Internet to present what she calls "simulations of the unseen." (Fusco, 160) Given that Fusco's performance of Dolores refers to the material conditions of the medium, the hardware as a site of performance, the Internet appeared as the perfect medium to stage simulations of what is not generally shown,. The artist appropriated digital networks to expose the reality of an everydayness that does not typically circulate online.
Coco Fusco's net-performance, Dolores from 10 to 10, engages the digital as a visual medium. Transmitted through webcams and surveillance monitors, Fusco's performance offers a representation of the bodies that are not shown online: the bodies of those who assemble our machines. In this 2001 webcast performance, Fusco reenacted the story of Delfina Rodriguez, a maquiladora or assembly line worker she met in 1998. Rodriguez's boss held her hostage for 12 hours in an attempt to force her to resign. The worker later sued the company but, according to the court, she was not able to prove that she had been restrained in the workplace. The factory management claimed that inspecting Rodriguez's personal belongings they found unionizing pamphlets that posed a threat to the factory, which prompted them to fire her.
When Fusco learned about this case, the artist speculated that surveillance recordings from the closed circuit TV systems that are generally used to monitor employees would have played a vital role in supporting the worker's claim. However, no surveillance recordings were entered as evidence in the trial, and because there was no ransom demand, the judge dismissed the case. Fusco conceived Dolores from 10 to 10 as "a story that no one saw."
Dolores from 10 to 10 presents the hyperexposure of workers under the 24/7 vigilance of Closed Circuit TV as a condition of the workers' disappearance and invisibility. The performance shows that surveillance in the workplace fulfills a function opposite to that of street surveillance. While surveillance systems in the street turn people's private whereabouts into public matter, in production and manufacturing sites, cameras expose workers to a close monitoring that alienates them from the outside world. In this sense, the use of surveillance systems in the workplace resembles the function of the penitentiary panopticon, as commented upon by Foucault.
Fusco's twelve-hour live streaming video performance was launched on November 22 of 2001, from Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Helsinki, Finland, and simultaneously broadcast as part of different cultural events in Los Angeles, London, and Ljubljana.
Four cameras recount the situations endured by Dolores, the worker, from four different viewpoints. Like blinking, rotating eyes, the cameras take turns in a surveillance round that offers brief black and white static views of the room in which Dolores is locked. The position of the cameras, generally shooting from above, and the absence of sound allow for the viewer to focus on the characters' gestures, body language, and proxemics, that is, on the distance between the performers.
In Dolores from 10 to 10, Fusco denounces the unrestricted invasiveness of surveillance cameras in the workplace as a blatant form of subjugation. In contrast to the way in which surveillance footage functions when released on TV or on the Net without the consent of surveilled people, this performatic reshaping of surveillance constitutes Fusco's response to the worker's claim in court. Fusco's performance, which she presents as "an enabling fiction" (161), restores visibility in favor of the worker. She thereby offers the maquila worker an alternate position from which to participate in the field of vision.
What happens when a Closed Circuit TV system is wired to reach the Internet, and audience reception is networked to allow for interactivity? What changes when surveillance images of factory workers are broadcast as webcam material? As a docu-drama, a performance based on a real life episode, Dolores not only tells the story of the maquila worker but it also examines the particular positioning of spectators in relation to what they see. The piece reconnects viewers to streamed images, inviting them to become responsible spectators, in an ethical move from voyeurism to witnessing. These constitute two very distinct forms of spectatorship: Whereas "voyeurism" keeps the object separate from the subject that takes pleasure in watching, "witnessing" demands active spectators who take responsibility in relation to what they see. Dolores as a webcam performance challenges the distance between that which is exposed or revealed and remote viewing subjects. Through the very mechanism that she critiques, Fusco presents the way in which gender, class, and globalism inform the practice of surveillance. The maquiladora system is the expression of the unequal distribution of labor in a global economy. Within this system, certain bodies and their labor are made invisible, with clear consequences for the rights and protections to which they can lay claim.
In submitting what "no one saw" to a shared viewing, Fusco intervenes in the logic of surveillance and voyeurism online to comment on the ethos of digital spectatorship. Rather than create images for a watcher—security guards, voyeurs—Fusco aims to create witnesses for images of transnational capital exploitation, reinstating the "unseen" for global spectators. In an interview published in The Drama Review, Fusco asks if we can use the Internet to present what she calls "simulations of the unseen." (Fusco, 160) Given that Fusco's performance of Dolores refers to the material conditions of the medium, the hardware as a site of performance, the Internet appeared as the perfect medium to stage simulations of what is not generally shown,. The artist appropriated digital networks to expose the reality of an everydayness that does not typically circulate online.
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