Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio—Refresh
Architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have created a Web event, Refresh, spon- sored by the Dia Center, which investigates “liveness” and authenticity. Their Web site collects twelve Webcams they selected from the thousands available on the Web. For each of these Webcam settings they created fictional narrative text and images, created by hiring actors to enact scenarios that digitally composite them into the original setting. A Web visitor coming to the site encounters a grid of images, one of which is the live updating Web camera and others that are the fictional versions. The site explores the role of mediation in our perceptions of “truth”:
For technophobes who blame technology for the collapse of the public sphere, liveness may be a last vestige of authenticity—seeing and/or hearing the event at the precise moment of its occur- rence. The unmediated is the immediate. For technophiles, liveness defines technology’s aspiration to simulate the real in real time. This skepticism [about truth] aids, to a degree, these artists’ desire to tease the distinctions: to undermine the authority of “live” overmediated experience and to collapse the two into an indeterminate unity.