Room4
2007 · Surveillance cameras, projectors and constructed labyrinth
Silas Emmery and Marie Kølbæk Iversen
Silas Emmery and Marie Kølbæk Iversen
Room4 connects four spaces within a constructed labyrinth through cameras and projections. Images circulate between rooms, extending the exhibition space and unsettling the viewer’s perception of their own body and presence. Looking becomes inseparable from being watched.
Within the labyrinth, cameras film the projected images in its four main spaces and relay them into other rooms. Physical and projected spaces overlap, creating a network in which viewers encounter themselves and others across different locations.
The act of viewing becomes both voyeuristic and narcissistic. Visitors watch others while being exposed to their gaze, encountering their own image alongside the images of those observing them. Each position remains unstable: the observer becomes the observed, and an apparently distant figure may be watching in return.
Room4 makes surveillance part of the spatial and social experience of the exhibition. Awareness of being visible can shape how visitors move, look and position themselves in relation to others. Their presence continually changes the images through which the installation is experienced.
The network operates as an abstract machine, processing bodies, images and acts of attention. Entering the work means becoming part of the system through which it takes form.