Had Video-Art Prepared us Enough for Zoom Meetings?
Trapped inside square screens.
Another normal day of work during the pandemic is composed by a screen divided in six or seven squares; in each one a face stares at me directly (or almost). The faces occupy practically all their tiny space inside the square, with a little of background to show behind the figure. I hear the faces speak, sometimes one at a time, sometimes two or three at the same time. Whichever is the case, it’s extremely hard to focus on what’s being said. Someone’s child can be heard on the background. Then, my cat enters the tiny space directed for my face only, her little pinkish nose smelling the screen as I try to push her away.
I'm nor surprised specialists are calling the tiredness of this new configuration of work of “Zoom fatigue” — it’s exhausting to talk at the screen and see the squares with the faces staring at us as the only human contact work can bring right now.
The pandemic only accelerated this strange behaviour. It was already intrinsic in contemporary work life — it’s just that home office is new for some of us. I don’t have so many digital meetings as my wife does, for instance. She, even in the office, even before the pandemic, tells me many of her meetings are through online spaces. Squared faces, digital voices heard on the headphone.
Video-art, anyone?
A camera staring at the face of a talking person can only remember me of one thing: video-art. The artists experiences with video and TV in the seventies may look like an artwork in the distant past; however, I think it may help us to understand our miserable days staring at faces in the screen.
Iconologically, the image of a face occupying all the frame was rare on painting. Film brought the idea of the “close-up” for its narrative purposes, including the close-up of the face, or even more specific places of it (remember the “travelling” of the camera of the woman’s eyes, nose, and mouth on Hitchcock’s Vertigo overture?).
Nonetheless, video became the first medium and device that is used to be so focused in the face (and in the face alone), differently from film. It happened because video became extremely personal. As amateur video cameras were fabricated smaller and smaller throughout the sixties and seventies, artists used this potency, like a recorded journal or recording an intimate experience. American performance artist Vito Acconci has a work where he talks confidences to the camera, his body compressed in the video space but his face (particularly his big forehead) rubbed at our noses in the screen as he mumbles. I suspect he has others works with a similar visuality.
As video became extremely personal, like a journal or to record an intimate experience, it focused more on the face.
Recording our faces through video in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and even early 2000s (with digital cameras) certainly prepared us to stare at our own faces on the cellphone camera. You may think this effect — staring at ourselves — was already was done for centuries by the mirror. Indeed it was, and it was compared to a mirror by important theorists, like critic Rosalind Krauss. In an iconic text called Video: The Aesthetics of Narcisism (1976), she points out that in the video medium there is an “mirror-reflection” of “absolute feedback”. But, as the invention of the camera obscura did nor guaranteed the engraving of photographic image — centuries lies between the invention of the first and the technical possibility of the latter -, our image in the mirror could not be “engraved”, or, to use video jargon, recorded. With the video medium, we look at our faces after we recorded it. There is obviously a gap, and artists tried to solve it by connecting the camera to a TV monitor to see the image live — to create the absolute feedback that Krauss talked about. Bruce Nauman worked on many installations with this purpose.
In smartphones, on the other hand (no pun intended), both recording and seeing live are made possible by the frontal camera, as do the webcam on laptops and computers. I wonder how video-artists (and Krauss herself) who worked with video feedback in the past became perplexed as these new technologies came out to definitely claim the recorded mirror-image. Or maybe not — they might just cross their arms and tell us: “Well, I warned you.”
Returning image and sound
However, the mere possibility of seeing our faces and recording them via a technical medium is not enough to think then implications of Zoom meetings. Or even Instagram and YouTube lives, because even if there is a possibility (choice) of recording them, the presumption of a live is just to be seem at that very moment.
The immediacy of Zoom, besides communicating in the meetings, is the returning image and sound. On Richard Serra’s video work called Boomerang (1974), artist Nancy Holt participate on an experiment of the returning sound of her talking. We only see her bright face in front of a blue background; sometimes she stares at us, sometimes don’t. She receives in the headphone her own voice, but with a slight delay. We, as spectators, hear both voices as some kind of echo (it seems like an irritating mechanical error). The art experiment is to Holt to express what she feels by listening to her own voice with the delay as she speaks.
Holt talks more slowly than the normal pace, clearly because she is confused by the late sound feedback. “It puts a distance between the words and their apprehension”, she states, carefully. “Or their comprehension”. In another part, she says that “I think that it makes my thinking slower” and “I have trouble making connections between thoughts”.
“It puts a distance between the words and their apprehension”, she states, carefully. “Or their comprehension”.
Although any decent Zoom or online meeting does not have this intentioned sound glitch — if it exists, it needs to be fixed — our difficulty to focus on what is said or even on what we say s can be brought up to light here. To speak online is not the same thing to speak to a person face to face. So, how do we construct our thoughts and express them to others in a so mediated and strange space? Are we expressing everything we want to? Do we have trouble making connections between thoughts? What are the impacts of it in our body and mind on the long term?
Disrupting the video space
Some meetings can become so annoying I want to throw my computer out of the window. I am willing to suspect it has sometimes more to do with the medium than with the content of the meeting per se.
Psychology has many explanations for my angry or frustration. In online meetings, we need to work harder to focus and process non-verbal features, like body language and facial expressions. There is an impulse for participants to talk all the time, which eliminates the moments of silence that are normal to any face to face conversation. We know we are being watched and become more self-concious. Also we don’t let our mind to wonder, among many other problems.
However, I think another problem that can be added is the lack of movement. We are both trapped metaphorically inside the screen as we are trapped physically at our desks.
Video-art can help us one more time. Many artists of the broadcast era tried to criticise the TV medium as an alienator of our everyday lives — by trying to destroy or disrupt this medium somehow. Peter Campus has a work called Three Transitions (1973), where his face will erupt from destroying previous images of… his own face. In the “same energy”, Joan Jonas show her square-compressed face in Left Side, Right Side (1972), and tries to play with the spectator using a mirror in half of her face. It’s more like she destroy the “credibility” of the medium. By doing so, the artist “with his/her corporeality, revolts against the monopoly of the medium reality”, according to art historian Hans Belting. It’s a claim for our bodies trapped in front of the TV, or, nowadays, in front of the computer or the smartphone. Or trapped in the square of Zoom meetings.
“I am surrounding by me”, says Nancy Holt on the echo of Serra’s Boomerang. We are on the screen, cornered and surrounded by ourselves.
The entrapment of the work life is not anything new — it only gets progressively worst since the 1700s, or the advent of the modern cities. Sociologist Richard Sennet said that the construction of modern cities made a promise to its population that has not been fulfilled. The 1700s urban planners of cities like London and Berlin promised velocity, impetuosity, vigour. Instead, what we have in big cities since then until today are nothing more than boredom, immobility (think of people in their cars in intense traffic, or in the bus or subway), excess of work, and loneliness.
Online meetings are the ultimate modern life’s immobility. The state is of full body paralysis. Without contact, our faces stare at each others our bodies are more immobile that they’ve ever been in our dystopic dreams. I always thought the connected, lazy humans of Pixar’s Wall-E (2008) were exaggerating the problem, since mobile phones and wearable devices were developing a more dynamic perspective on body and technology. However, the perspective of talking through that small camera while sitting in a chair all day makes me more pessimist.
Online meetings are the ultimate modern life’s immobility. Without contact, our faces stare at each others our bodies are more immobile that they’ve ever been in our dystopic dreams.
It’s not a “pandemic problem”. Social isolation is important and crucial to public health. It’s how we make the isolation, how we use our time and how work is configured that is the problem.
We, bureaucratic home workers, sadder and sadder encapsulated in our safe homes, just waiting for our next Amazon delivery by a low-payed worker risking their life and staring at squares with faces on the screen. Video-art already predicted it.
“I am surrounded by me.”
