Will You Marry Me?
Digital Video/ Work in Progress
Within their images of both techno-utopias and techno-dystopias, many science fiction authors and filmmakers have included cinematic technologies that allow characters to see each other and interact face-to-face over great distances. The idea of image-phones is as old as the invention of the telephone, and even precedes the invention of cinema. In fact, two months after the announcement of the invention of the telephone, George DuMaurier published a cartoon depiction of the “telecinemascope” in the London Herald, expressing a desire for images to travel with voices, enabling participants to see as well as hear one another. A contemporary of DuMaurier, science fiction writer Albert Robida, envisioned image-phones as an integral part of 20th century life, serving both as a one-way, broadcast media, as well as, a two-way communications medium. The 20th century, in actuality, realized the rise of the former technology but not the latter. Broadcast television has become an ever-present reality, whilst the idea of the ubiquitous videophone still conjures up images of the future. Furthermore, videophone technology, which has been around since the AT&T’s Picturephone was introduced in 1964, has failed to become little more than a technological novelty.
Will You Marry Me? is a video work that investigates and questions the peculiar history and prehistory of the technology we now refer to as the videophone- from the 19th century science-fiction images to its many forms today. The video is constructed from various sources including science fiction films, 19th century illustrations, archived documentation of videophone devices, outtakes from television commercials, and footage of major technology conventions both past and present. The video attempts to construct a history of the videophone not only as a history of a technology, but also, and more importantly, as a history of a change in social desires during the 20th century. The voiceover narration attempts to evoke something poetic and strange in our desires to both have and not have this technology.
Formally, the work puts into question the spectators’ desire for images. For instance the opening sequence is an imageless, black screen, with a narrator describing a relationship with a distant mother that suffers from the lack of images. The first image is of an unedited outtake of a Motorola commercial for a new videophone product. The commercial shows the intimacy that can be achieved through the product. An airline pilot proposes marriage to his girlfriend through the videophone, as Motorola proposes to society a proposal that has gone unanswered many times before.
My interest with the work is to represent the desire to see (and perhaps to not be seen) in this particular social history - to evoke those desires in the video’s audience through the power of cinematic forms and devices - but to do so in a way that brings the experience, the medium, and subject matter in critical contact with one another.
