Me, Me, You, Me – Interactive Single Channel Video Artwork, 2005

Me, Me, You, Me an interactive single channel video artwork by Lincoln Schatz is about the viewer. It is a meditation on the idea of the two selves: the outer self, which we present to the world, and the inner self, which generates the internal dialog and self-consciousness.

 

On a visual level, they are the same, just as we see a faithful reflection of ourselves when looking in a mirror. At this point, the two selves appear as one. It is the second self, the internal self, which greatly skews this relationship.

Onscreen there are two aspects of the viewer, two selves. Presented in a long narrow box on the right side is the viewer in real time, black and white, grainy. Across the two screens is the bust of the viewer, from shoulders to just over the head, a face filling the screen. This feed is memory only, 3 layers of immediate and distant memories, all in highly manipulated video. Moving through a short term memory database to source the video materials. This artwork plays with short time spans in ways that differentiate it from other works by Schatz. 

Read more about the artwork and the installation here.