Surveillance (redux)(part 1)
Originally aired on Vol 1 Brooklyn the week I returned from Europe (the first time). Edited for fun, the progression of time, and Substack. Part two to follow.
“Hi babies,” Janelle said as she stared at the camera propped in front of her. “Welcome back. So, I don’t like spon-con, or when my fake friends on the internet try to sell me fake shit.”
Janelle was recording a video. Twenty minutes ago she had made a makeshift video studio, leaning over her bed and tucking a flat sheet in tightly to the corner where the mattress hit the wall. A radiator in the opposite corner clanked with warmth. A Sunday evening rain fell in a constant, reassuring pattern. Her hands had moved methodically, smoothing the flat sheet. She had then hung three more flat sheets, in the exact same color, along clothesline spanning the two and a half walls flanking her full size bed. This created the effect of a powder blue room.
Janelle had then set up an old DSLR camera on a black stool that held, altar-like, a small flexible tripod and a ring light. She twisted another flexible camera mount around a tall lamp and attached a second, smaller camera so that it angled down over her sheets, framing the bed on a diagonal, CCTV-style. She tapped record on both cameras and sat down on the bed, crossing her legs. Her thin shins tapered outward to two knobby knees, floating a few inches above the sheets. Onscreen the blue box around her radiated from her dark hair in soft contrast.
Janelle pulled out a vape pen shaped like a Capri cigarette from the front pocket of her green babydoll polo shirt and rolled it back and forth in her fingers.
“Honestly, I’m not popular enough to get sponsored.” She inhaled from her vape pen then exhaled. “Maybe I am. Either way, I’m very sorry this video will be about an app because I’m broke and I do need affiliate linking. And, whatever, I will atone for the sin of talking about an app by working in a collapsing empire for sixty more years and dying alone.” She inhaled again.
“So, let’s get into it. The app is called Arhythmia. I’ve been using it for two weeks, and it knows everything about me. It tells me how I feel all the time. Yes, the name is stupid. And yes, surveillance is the profound hopelessness of our era. However...”
She rolled the vape pen back and forth between her thumb and index finger.
“I am a completely different person because of it.”
Janelle angled her chin downward to catch a good angle and leaned forward holding her phone up to the first camera’s frame. Her fingers wrapped around the phone with their sharp peach nails pointed dead to the center of the screen, which looked like an oil slick with thin, wobbly rings of red and orange sliding out to the edges from left of center.
“Okay, look. It measures biometrics. It uses this small sensor which is basically a clear sticker you wear on your wrist,” she said as she held up her other hand to show a transparent, circular sticker, which was nearly invisible in the pixelated DSLR feed. “It’s hard to see unless you know what to look for. Of course now I’m investigating people’s wrists like a little idiot detective. Like, are you also emotionally unavailable? Do you also need help understanding basic truths about yourself?
As she spoke the red rings proliferated further, wobbling toward the outer edges as the orange rings faded. Janelle turned to her phone to evaluate the event and smiled. In response the red rings course corrected from an outward wobble to an upward float, turning to pink then lavender and dissolving as they hit the top edge of the screen.
“Anyway, this sensor picks up on crazy shit. For example, it shows me things like, when I was walking around the neighborhood I lived in six months ago, and I was feeling weirdly nostalgic…nostalgia isn’t the right word for it. Because I don’t know what the right word for it is. But, I wanted to indulge in the memories from when I lived there, even though those memories are terrible. And mostly have to do with an ex boyfriend. Arhythmia was able to visualize that train of thought, which made the emotion make sense.
The screen of Janelle’s phone pulsed in shades of pink and red, as she rarely spoke aloud for this long.
“It’s a bit like an aura, so you do have to be intuitive about the whole thing. It’s not like the app is literally saying, you’re ‘mad’ or ‘in love’ or whatever.” She glanced at her phone.
“Instead let’s say you see the color red pop up, like what’s happening right now. Red can mean fear but red can also mean shame. I mean, they come from the same place.”
Janelle adjusted her posture so she was sitting up straighter.
“The best analogy that comes to my mind is body dysmorphia. Using Arhythmia is like being able to take a video instead of looking in the mirror, and in that video objectively being able to see, for example, “okay, from this angle I do look fat, but it’s because of the fit, not my body. There’s something very comforting about that kind of analysis.”
Janelle never planned her monologues and sometimes felt they ended up blurring out into meaningless poetics. She never worked on improving her rhetorical concentration though as her audience never commented on it. She assumed they liked to hear her voice enough to overlook the meandering.
“Anyway, I am not a grifter and you are not an idiot, and I really do want you to click that link, so you and I are going to test this shit out. Live, and on camera.” She drew out the last four words in a low voice and stared drolly into the camera.
Janelle put her phone down and pushed herself off the bed to stand. She paused recording on both cameras and walked out of her room and down a narrow hallway to the kitchen. She was searching for the art supplies stashed in various junk drawers near the fridge. In the second drawer she found an x-acto knife and a small plastic container of extra blades. She fit the handle with a new blade and returned to her room, stepping quietly even though both of her roommates were out for the evening.
The cameras, the light, and the bed were all unmoved. Janelle grabbed a book from one of her shelves, hit both record buttons, and sat back down on the bed, knees falling back wide into a crossed position. She propped her phone up against the book for the first camera to see.
“Remember this from high school, babies?” she said as she held up the x-acto knife and smiled at the camera. “Or maybe middle school if you knew anything about the world. Now watch my phone. We are going to test out if this thing understands a very specific experience.” She began to cut a thin line down her forearm, drawing blood. She smiled but there was no pageantry in her movement.
As she cut into her skin the haptics in her phone shuddered, the screen roiling in color from an anxious yellow to a muddy green. The pixels appeared to boil beneath the surface. Janelle’s gaze flitted from her phone to her arm, indulging in the visual contrast.
“I think everyone is going to have to get comfortable with pain. Integrate back into your body in 2025.” She looked up. “Did you know the Victorians ruined self-harm and made it seem like it was for attention? Then in the 20th century doctors categorized self-harm as a manipulative tactic that was mostly done by women. So I’m fighting the patriarchy right now. Just kidding. Just trying to keep my screen time low.
She stared into the camera in front of her, her almond eyes squinting as she adjusted her expression, trying to find purchase in the situation she was presenting. “My point is, before we pathologized emotion, people used to let it unfold around them.”
She then laid back onto her bed—the floor of her makeshift, powder blue studio—and looked up to her second camera. She lifted up her arms, with grace and with willowed fingers, and continued making small, deep cuts in a line along her forearm.
She went on talking and cutting for a few more minutes, until the cuts she made began to hurt. She then excused herself, letting the cameras record the small, empty soundstage, and returned with a blue towel wrapped around her arm. She picked up her phone and studied the screen.
“I’m going to get demonetized for a month after I post. But tell me that isn’t the truth,” she said as she watched her phone screen pulse erratically with rivers of navy and brown and small clusters of light orange pixels punctuating like sunbeams. “No filter, babies. Put it in my Hinge profile.” She turned her phone back to the camera and laid bare her heart as a series of triumphantly colored squares began to dizzy themselves across the screen. The squares hummed and settled, nervous then self-satisfied.
She said goodbye with a flirt of a wave from her undamaged arm and paused recording on both cameras. After downloading the footage to her laptop she clicked through a few options to add background music, auto-edit from multiple angles, and overlay a filter so her skin glowed with a golden sheen. From her phone she exported a clip from Arhythmia that matched the timecode from filming and added it to the video as the bottom quarter of an uneven split screen. This created an off-kilter mosaic effect in the footage where she had held her phone up close to the camera. Janelle thought the it worked well enough.
She uploaded the video to her public account and jogged to the bathroom.