This project is constituted by a number of paper peep boxes containing scenes of civil disobedience and social unrest, from the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis to the Standing Rock protests.
The peep box was a virtual reality technology from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that generated realistic optical effects. Normally used to promote the sentiments and values of nationalism and Imperialism through wondrous scenes of “exotic” faraway lands, spectacular tourist sites and rousing feats of engineering, I have re-purposed the peep box for this project to instead celebrate and visualize contemporary scenes of political resistance, civil disobedience and pressing social and environmental issues.
Invoking an older generation of media to contextualize and emphasize today’s future-obsessed digital culture, this project reconstructs a past technology to visualize contemporary events and provide a handmade alternative to digital methods of producing virtual reality effects.
By turning to the past, this project is not meant to invoke feelings of nostalgia, but rather instead, suggest that older forms of media – particularly those we can make by hand ourselves - still hold the potential to powerfully transmit arresting images while symbolizing tactics of resistance to a culture more and more reliant on organizations that control the internet and those that control the hardware (and software) necessary to access it.
Some of the peep boxes and peep views include the 2008 Recession (top).
Peep boxes and accompanying cardboard cell phones installed on a cardboard plinth at LaMaMa, New York as part of CultureHub’s Re-Fest 2020 program.
