I was invited to be under surveillance for 12 hours 7pm-7am on Friday, February 19, 2021 as part of the PHI Centre’s INFRARED 15-night live broadcasting program. Because of Quebec’s COVID curfew restrictions regulating residents to not leave their homes from 8pm to 5am every night, this meant that I was locked in at the PHI.

It was not a show, not a cabaret, not a Zoom, not a social media take-over. It was a night of my life that was surveilled from a cultural space with me talking to the camera as though someone was there. With 3 or 4 surveillance cameras focused on 2 different spaces I used amidst a grid of 9, viewers could select a live broadcast camera via PHI’s website to observe. Another artist, Ianna Book, occupied several of the other views in this grid. Viewers could choose between us, open several windows at the same time, or observe the grid together all at once. With this configuration, viewers are voyeurs, watching online without the demands of interaction, a jarring block to online etiquette (like/love/favorite/unfollow/thumbs up/thumbs down) and required digital participation many of us have learned and depended on since the start of the pandemic.

Throughout the 12 hours I was under surveillance, I had no idea if anyone was watching. I really liked thinking that maybe people were there or maybe they weren’t. Either way was okay because I was there with myself and that seemed really important, especially as we are/were all so exhausted from the pandemic, and a lot of people are isolated and just trying to get through this on their own. I found this uncertainty of someone watching or not comforting.

I divided the night into 2 parts: the first part as a hangout and a real-time experience of working in my studio. For me, this meant ‘getting ready’: spending an amount of time getting dressed, talking about where outfits came from, doing my hair with hair extensions, putting on makeup (poorly), and narrating this entire process. In the studio space, which was set up temporarily for this event, I decided performance-based activities were best, as watching me edit video all night might not be super engaging. In my art practice, I play with pop culture, which is often the building blocks for cabaret works, video, and installation. In this particular instance, I utilized Headphone Karaoke, a practice I’ve engaged with before which means that I am the only one who can hear the musical track as I sing songs with a microphone fully equipped with reverb. I added Google Dictate and Google Translate (English to French) as a projected backdrop to capture the inconsistencies and slippages of language under these conditions.

Under Surveillance at the PHI, I literally slept with my work. The second part of the surveillance featured me sleeping, which tied thematically to my installation Restless, which is composed of 7 monitors of me and my girlfriend sleeping. These 7 monitors each show a composition of my bad sleep: nightmares, involuntary arm aerobics, sleep talking, and waking up. I transformed the temporary studio space that I utilized in the first part of the evening into a sleeping space complete with blow up mattress and cozy quilt for ‘bedtime’. Somehow, this proximity of sleeping with my work gave me comfort because it reminded me of my bad sleeping experiences and reassured me that everything would eventually be okay because I’ve slept poorly before, been scared or confused, and woken up, and everything was okay after a while. This cycle seems to be both a metaphor for getting through the pandemic as it is practical advice I give myself for getting through the night.

I didn’t sleep great that night under surveillance. I slept maybe for a few hours with a few nightmare events, which although was not fantastic for me, was probably good for the performance, should anyone be watching 😉