Michelle Teran, Life: A User's Manual, #15, 2003

Teran walks through the city, using her wireless video receiver to spy on surveillance cameras installed in any number of interstitial spaces: waiting rooms, lobbies, empty restaurants. Teran presents the images that her receiver has intercepted from the surveillance cameras on the monitors, which the participants in her performances can view while standing outside the spaces monitored by the surveillance cameras. The images that Teran's receiver picks up reveal the utter banality of much of what is captured by surveillance cameras: spaces are often empty and may remain devoid of human activity for great lengths of time. Her work taps into scenes that occur behind walls, tantalizing those that participate in her walks or view the documentation on her website to go a step further and fantasize a bit more (based on these fragments that Teran provides) about what else goes on inside. An effective narrative tension is created, when after a long period of inactivity, finally the stillness is broken by the sudden presence of a human. Who are they and why are they there? Who has placed the camera and why are they watching?

Michelle Teran was born in Canada in 1966. An interdisciplinary performance artist, she divides her time between Canada and Europe.

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