Subject / Object Relations

Interactive Installation

2010

Subject/Object Relations is an interactive installation and performative experiment. Each subject is measured with a measuring tape, given a positive evaluative comment about their body or not, and either photographed or not. Their data is recorded, coded, and plotted onto time-based graphs. Objectification is inherent in the processes of both the fields of art and psychology, as ideas are reified and concretized, studied and analyzed. However, research in this area has been restricted because it is often ethically gray. Subject/Object Relations questions the ethical and conceptual restrictions that have been imposed from inside the field of psychology, some of which have limited the development of research, while exploring the relationship that art and psychology can have with each other.

Experiments about objectification have been restricted to vignettes, diary and lab studies, which have questionable levels of generalizability to real world applications. No experiments about objectification have manipulated the condition of objectification in a public setting or used photography as an independent variable. By contrast, performances and interventions frequently occur in public settings, and depend on the presence of a public, and theories about objectification in art have often centered around photography.