Nick Kaye: Oursler’s approach to presence addresses the place and function of media as a “mimetic technology,” a term he reports borrowing from “[p]harmacology, psycho-mimetic drugs, drugs that mimic portions of our mental state” (Oursler in Meyer-Stoll 2007). In elaborating this concept, Oursler has suggested that:

Mimetic systems can be seen as amplifiers of human drives and as site of psychological projection on the part of the viewer. The appearance of the devil in relation to the evils of technology is the personification of fears. Technology can be seen as the fear of the unknown and thus as a mirror of the viewer’s fear of their own potential. (Oursler 2001: 174)

In this context, Oursler’s grammar has developed toward equations between media technologies and psychological states and processes, moving directly, with Window Project in 1991, toward the creation of video work that “looks back.” Consisting of three discrete performances to camera by three performers; the writer and performance artist Karen Finley, the artist and poet Constance DeJong, and musician Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; Oursler back-projected these works onto outward facing windows of the gallery. In his outline of the project, he notes that:

The idea of converting a window into a screen began with the impulse to counter the passive situation associated with video viewing. Also, I wanted to create a situation which would extend the works to a public outside of the institution, in other words into the street. (Oursler in Malsch 1995: 52-7)

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References

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