Be Careful Who Sees You When You Dream

Jenny Marketou

11 January 2005

Airborne installation, live video, video screens, wireless media, red helium weather balloons.

Be Careful Who Sees You When You Dream is an imaginative environment of heliumfilled meteorological (latex) balloons attached to the floor of the gallery.

The balloons are equipped with small, wireless surveillance video cameras especially designed for the project, and visitors are invited to take a balloon on a walk through the exhibition grounds.

Visitors’ movements through the grounds and installation are recorded as ephemera and traces and are broadcast live on screens in the exhibition space.

The installation lures the visitors into self-imposed encounters with surveillance as they offer themselves as the watched subjects. In a playful way, Marketou’s project raises serious issues about the relationship between the recorded image and the spectator, surveillance, and the contemporary society of spectacle.