Reel Time Rear Window (2016) is a two channel video installation that deconstructs Alfred Hitchcock's original Rear Window and reconstructs it as an exploration of the relationship between reel and real time and between the voyeur and the object of his voyeurism.

The original film was spliced into two new and independent films which play simultaneously: the first is comprised of every frame shot inside of the apartment looking out - the gaze of the voyeur; and the second is comprised of every frame shot outside of the apartment - the objects of voyeurism. The scenes outside of the apartment play in reel time as Hitchcock intended, while the scenes inside of the apartment speed up and slow down in real time order to keep pace with the original narrative of the film.

This cinematic master and slave relationship invites the viewer to experience the object of voyeurism and the reaction of the voyeur simultaneously; it is also a metaphor for L.B. Jefferies' enslavement by the object of his obsession, and as such a rumination on the dangerous nature of our own contemporary voyeuristic tendencies.

The real time manipulation of the video speed is both an exploration of the protagonist's cabin fever psychology - time alternates between a sluggish boredom and rapid bursts of excitement - and an homage to Hitchcock's own use of fast motion film making during the climactic scene of the original Rear Window.

Reel Time Rear Window can to be installed with the two channels playing side-by-side on a flat surface, or, more ideally, as a double sided semi-transparent floating projection, placing the real time viewers in simultaneous roles as practitioners and objects of voyeurism.

Materials: Rear Window, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1954); textilene

August 2016