"Life: a user's manual is a series of public performances and online mappings by Michelle Teran that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us."
"Puzzlement, amusement, disorientation, surprise" are normal reactions...People are feeling insecure, but their security equipment gives only an illusion of protection," Teran said. "It's just something that comes in a box and they pick it up but they don't really understand how their contribution is affecting the city. I like the idea of people transmitting their personal narratives that are overlays of the city, these invisible stories. The camera starts to create a story about the person who has it and where they're placed within the city. I see the same scenes over and over again; the camera is watching daily banalities, maybe something that is a private moment that maybe I shouldn't be watching. For example, a son had set up a camera for his elderly mother just to make sure that she doesn't fall, and I was able to see her sitting up and calling to him. Am I invading somebody's private space or are they coming into mine?"
All Images: MICHELLE TERAN
MONTRÉAL WALK
May 19, 2005
"During Agnès Varda's 1986 film 'Vagabond, the viewer is first introduced to Mona, a drifter, as a frozen corpse. For the rest of the film, through interviews and flashbacks, Varda uses other people's memories to construct an image of the drifter, as she moves from village to village, in the deadness of a French winter. In Montréal a small group is led through China Town and into the parking lot of theHaunted House dinner theatre where a female vagabond wearing a leather jacket and backpack and carrying a portable cd player stands waiting. They are led on a nomadic journey through a dead/non dead area of Montréal by this transient woman who acts as a (silent) medium to the unseen. The walk takes them past construction sites with billboards depicting futuristic scenes of condominium dwellers, into the dead spaces of alleyways, across Boulevard René Lévesque(famous for his fight for Quebec separatism), and finally ending in front of theHudson's Bay Company."
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