Panel Statement

Panel:  Intimate TV: Webcamming & Social Life-logging In the Surveillant-Sousveillant Space

Through­out my life I have been ra­di­ographed, sono­graphed, scanned, and had my blood pres­sure, bone struc­ture, mus­cu­lar mass and heart beats mea­sured… I keep my­self safe. Any strange anom­aly can be de­tected, pho­tographed and analysed. Sur­veil­lance is needed. Tech­nol­ogy is needed for sur­veil­lance to per­sist. In the name of health and well-be­ing, one is ad­vised to watch, to pre­vent and obey med­ical pro­ce­dures. Con­tin­u­ously, I am pre­sented with im­ages me­di­ated by tech­nol­ogy, per­tain­ing to a code I can not ac­cess for I lack the knowl­edge to in­ter­pret it, and yet they pro­lif­er­ate around me – pri­vate, in­ti­mate, im­ages of lungs, of an ovary, of a de­faulted organ, of an un­born baby…  This is a pa­per-per­for­mance on the pol­i­tics in­volved in the sur­veil­lance of the self, ques­tion­ing tech­nol­ogy as a “bio-tool” for com­mu­ni­ca­tion of in­ter­nal im­ages that are en­gaged with the self. This is also a bio-pa­per-per­for­mance of the per­former’s body, watch­ing her­self being watched by med­ical ma­chin­ery, ex­pos­ing a se­ries of per­sonal med­ical im­ages. Con­tin­u­ing the work I have been de­vel­op­ing con­cern­ing in­ti­mate tech­nol­ogy and in­ti­mate sto­ries, I in­tend to ex­plore the aes­thetic of tech­nolo­gies that sur­round our every­day life.

• Eu­nice Gonçalves Duarte is a por­tuguese per­for­mance artist and re­searcher on the uses of low tech in dig­i­tal per­for­mance. She has a BA in Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Cul­ture Sci­ences and in 2002 com­pleted the MA in Con­tem­po­rary Drama Stud­ies in the Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Dublin (Dublin, Ire­land).
  She is cur­rently a PhD stu­dent in Uni­ver­si­dade de Coim­bra, de­vel­op­ing a the­sis on the aes­thet­ics of dig­i­tal per­for­mance. Eu­nice has worked with the­atre com­pa­nies and the­atre prac­ti­tion­ers in Por­tu­gal and in Eu­rope and since 2003, has re­searched dig­i­tal media in the­ater and per­for­mance. Re­cently she di­rected the low tech dig­i­tal per­for­mance “a história é clan­des­tina” (‘stealth sto­ries’).  In ad­di­tion to her artis­tic prac­tice, Eu­nice Gonçalves Duarte lec­tures the­atre and per­for­mance at the In­sti­tuto Su­pe­rior de Ciências Ed­uca­ti­vas (Lis­bon, Por­tu­gal).  semaforo.cc