RING/CAM is a series of multisite artistic interventions initiated by the curatorial collective 2 curators 1 collapse (Joachim Aagaard Friis and Elia-Rosa Guirous-Amasse). Artists interrogate, disrupt, and reimagine the entanglements between new technologies and society, where the body, the lens, and the feed intersect. The series explores opacity, concealment, and disobedience as resistance to (sur)veillance capitalism, in digital and physical realms.

Each intervention addresses a distinct aspect, from post-internet to performance arts. Prior collaborators include Zach Blas (US), Ruba Al-Sweel (UAE), Ada Ada Ada (DK), Hannibal Dahl (DK), Kay Yoon (SK), and Margaret Abeshu Liversby (NO/ETH).

RING/CAM #4: Closed-Circuit Terminal Viewing
A commissioned installation and performance by Ruby Chen (b. 2001; Taiwan) unfolds in the Meridian courtyard of the Monnaie de Paris. Seated in car seats, a performer observes and mimics the audience like a human CCTV system. Through compulsive imitation she becomes indistinguishable from the crowd, then turns inward, monitoring and regulating herself until conformity becomes a mechanism of entrapment.

The car seats are both mobility and restraint. As seat belts fasten, movement reverses into immobilisation, drawing on Paul Virilio’s ‘Aesthetics of Disappearance’ and Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s ‘Can’t Help Myself’. Surveillance and conformity compose a closed circuit; the tension lies in the absence of an external captor, as the system is internal to the body.