For my graduate thesis, I created a video art installation titled VIDEOSPHERE: You Are Always On A Screen Somewhere… (2023). This thesis was an exhibition that occurred in real and virtual space. It was seen physically and electronically throughout physical space and screen space, using cameras trained on screens. This was an open circuit of surveillance where visitors could see themselves, and interact with their electronic reflection with movement.


The project was chock full of analog and digital screens, cameras and a VR headset. All of it demonstrated the dynamics of interaction and shared signals between analog and digital tools for making surveillance observable. The intended message was to:


1.    Make an audience aware of the presence of video technology, and to consider the implications of video collectively occupying physical and sending out signal from many iterations of technology.

2.    That modern video signal is still tied to past forms of televised and closed-circuit surveillance. That while the video screen generates an interactive space, it also attracts activity to be done through video which expands the application of video surveillance.


Video surveillance has transitioned beyond just humans watching screens. Rather video surveillance is the surveillance of the video screen itself. That surveillance space is made up by cameras embedded around and within the screen itself, recording both sides of the screen as the real and virtual collapse together through shared response and reaction.


But to talk about space, environment, and the time-space of video is ontologically difficult because human perception usually conflates the real with virtual subjects. The mind even prefers the hyperreal electronic liveness of video to the reality of events, objects, and individuals. The VIDEOSPHEREinstallation itself, put video on display while the exhibition space was displayed by video. The two kinds of space that inform the other are not easily divorced as a media environment that exists as a video space. But where is the interactive space generated when the virtual and physical collapse into one another? Can we talk about it in a way that does not hurt my head? This lack of understanding of how to talk about the video environment in regards to overall environment, was the loose end of the project.



I used the word “Videosphere” which is taken from Gene Youngblood, who created the word to theorize a new environmental phase, the way in which architectural and mental space was being altered by the dominance of television. Youngblood also speculated how further changes would happen with the advent of new miniature devices and public video communication systems. Rather than being a single channel experience, the inclusion of numerous video cameras and screens has turned contemporary experience in multimedia viewing, and colonized physical space with multi-channel access.



Along with Youngblood’s chapter from Expanded Cinema (1970) my project also drew indirect inspiration from other fictional media literature. The graphic novel Watchmen (1987) authored by Allen Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, contains various kinds of sense perception through maps, newspaper media, quantum power, and a meta-narrative comic strip. In particular the character Ozymandias, known publicly as Adrian Veidt is drawn to and powered by video technology.



As a former masked vigilante who became wealthy through using his heroic image for money-making, Veidt is shown tapping into the information network of television with a wide and tall matrix of TV monitors and international clocks. Precluding the internet, Moore represents television as the dominant information medium due to its live feed. Veidt observes the different information streams simultaneously to then feel out and synthesize opinions and ideas for business strategies. As business man, Veidt believes that the best solutions for saving the world are business solutions with investments, production, and mechanical invention. The logic of Veidt’s methods is told in an inner dialogue as follows:



“Observation: Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by [William] Burroughs cut-up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through.” – Chapter XI Page 1


Veidt can be characterized as a man of his times as a post-modernist viewer. He is locked into the stream of video, and the circulation of messages, waiting for answers to arrive from a non-stop broadcast. But Veidt is also different from the typical viewer glued to a single stream. His genius and wealth enable him to re-configure television into a grid of multiple channels to be viewed all at once. He engages in the overwhelming complexity of global messaging and networks that few people want to engage with. The broader view of all messages helps him notice general trends and economic strategies that are happening Live. Rather than being swayed by a certain message, Veidt is trying to detect an undercurrent of activities and planning happening in the global economy through the television, the tool used by marketers themselves. And like the internet the information is public, but his arrangement the channels is wholly private.


I did not create a direct homage to the character of Veidt or the invention of his grid. His name is mentioned on a poster I made and some images from the comic strip appeared in a VR scene I designed. Looking back now, I can see better how the term Videosphere applies to Veidt, my project, and what the term means concretely as a spatial orientation and observation.


Veidt by compiling different screen content, he succeeded in making a new, larger screen space similar to the multi-screen “Valsulka Effect” fashioned by video artists Woody and Steina Vasulka. Reality, or the world rather, is being mapped and laid out not as a continents and oceans, but as a grid work of windows. The real world it seems is really happening on television. His unnamed matrixing of television and his method for observing it, is a Videosphere. Both the room for this TV assemblage and Veidt’s attention are conformed to screen watching. Veidt is totally with the World as he calls and utterly separate from it as a masterful viewer.



The way in which we appear in a video screen via security cameras without knowing it at a given moment, and then there is the way in which in appear and simultaneously see ourselves, on personal computers and smartphones through web cameras. These signals are not relegated to just a single viewing location and can be transmitted to multiple screens elsewhere. This elsewhere can be the collective view of all screens, all feeds, and all channels. As a closed-circuit video system, this de-centralized patchwork of screens was an environment for viewing the activity of visitors and screens. The Videosphere is a new space and way of looking in which the space is composed by the matrix of individual screens, arranged and unionized as broad information feed for the human, and total sphere of information for machine and computer vision. The videosphere can be flat, circular, spherical, etc. It is canvas that is only limited by the resolution of the output. It does exist for around us but we do not get to see it unified, only in fragments of solitary screens.


Therefore, there are many videospheres happening from the localized CCTV system to the control rooms of National Intelligence and Television Studios. A videospheres scope is only bound the number of inputs and outputs received by screen, camera, and virtual camera. The videosphere could just be called a multimedia experience, but that would exclude the idea of channels. There is a sender and receiver, not just a beholder of one’s own image and pictures from somewhere else.