Screening Room

American artist Kristin Lucas was commissioned to create The Screening Room (1998), an interactive installation. Her initial motivation was “the ’70s optimism towards consumer electronics and the ’90s fetishism about compression.” The Screening Room consisted of a white cube-room barely big enough to fit two or three people. A wall screen on one side showed two pre-recorded videos of the artist as a teenager and as a grown-up. These personas were shown in the same white cube, as if in search of one another. Hidden lipstick cameras projected the image of the viewer on the very same screen. The pressure-sensitive floor functioned as a menu that triggered either the cameras or the looped videos. The viewer thus became an actor in what seemed to be a maze created by a technology that can inform and entertain or isolate and alienate.