A women's restroom's existing surveillance infrastructure—motion sensors, door contacts—rewired through a MAKE controller and a custom MAX/MSP/Jitter patch to trigger recorded audio of an intimate encounter: a male and female voice arguing and making love. A woman entering the restroom becomes, without knowing it, the triggering mechanism for a sonic fiction.
The three documented responses give the work its critical fingerprints. One visitor thought two real people had come in—the fiction replacing reality completely. Another stayed, too curious to leave—the restroom's architecture of privacy temporarily converted into a theater. A third called it “an Andy Kaufman kind of joke”—the most accurate placement, since Kaufman's sustained ontological experiments made the audience's uncertainty about what was real the primary medium.
Made in 2009, at the precise moment networked sensor infrastructure was becoming ubiquitous in American institutions but before public consciousness of it had formed. The work does not comment on surveillance from outside; it inhabits it, and uses its own mechanisms to deliver what it was never designed to carry: the sound of two humans in the full complexity of their private life.
