In this presentation, David Levine will discuss how a 2004 trip to Berlin’s Volksbuehne led him to conspiracy theories about the transformation of performance into spectatorship, spectatorship into surveillance, and surveillance into transcendence.

What You Get Is What You See: A Series on Spectatorship

(WYGIWYS gif by Alison S. M. Kobayashi)

What hides behind simple gestures of attending?

In this series, UnionDocs invites artists and writers to show us how to become more active, more engaged–and perhaps better–spectators. The speakers share their experiences and personal observations as viewers, readers, watchers, listeners and audience members of visual, video and performance arts, graphic design, radio, TV and cinema. Through their trained gaze and skilled sensitivity, they disturb and displace our perception of contemporary culture and expose spectatorship as an everyday dynamic act.

A series curated by Mathilde Walker-Billaud.

David Levine is an artist living in New York and Berlin. His work incorporates video, photography, performance, and theater, and has been seen at MoMA, Mass MOCA, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin).  His work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, and the New York Times, and his writing has appeared in Parkett, Mousse, and Cabinet. He recently directed an opera about the pop group Milli Vanilli.