PARENT FOLDER

2012–2013

Parent Folder is a multi-part project centred on the collection of property surveillance images. Developed over a 12-month period, the work includes a stop-motion digital video (11:59), a daily surveillance log compiled as a self-published book, jacquard weavings derived from captured images, and a digitally printed silk body pillow used by the artist during a year-long performed act of sleeping.

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The project draws on psychogeography, the study of how environments shape emotion and behaviour, extending this framework into digital space. Here, place is doubled, existing simultaneously as lived environment and as mediated representation within networked systems.

Using remote access to a domestic surveillance camera, the artist observed and recorded fragments of her father’s daily life, downloading footage from an archive titled Parent Folder. This material becomes the basis for a series of translations across media, transforming acts of watching into objects, images, and embodied gestures. The project engages the computational logic of “parent” and “child” directories as both structural and relational metaphor.

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Parent Folder interrogates surveillance as a technology that mediates relationships in the absence of co-presence, replacing embodied interaction with systems of observation and data exchange. Within this framework, affective bonds are structured through interfaces that both connect and distance, situating intimacy within regimes of capture, classification, and control.

 

The work was presented in exhibitions including Cyber In Securities (Pepco Edison Place Gallery, Washington, DC), The Works Art & Design Festival (Edmonton), Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton), Mouse Print Gallery (Concordia University), Art Mûr (Montreal), and Studio XX (Montreal) as part of the HTMlles Festival (2016). The work has been written about in: MOREN, Lisa. 2017. “Algorithmic Pollution: Artists Working with Dataveillance and Societies of Control.” Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Fall 2017.