Pseudo Studio Walk by Halona Hilbertz

by Clara Perlmutter

Hilbertz, Halona - Pseudo Studio Walk from Franklin Furnace on Vimeo.

Not gonna lie, although I was fascinated by “Pseudo Studio Walk” by Halona Hilbertz as soon as I saw that it was a 48 minute video of a woman walking around an empty studio, I was also somewhat dreading actually watching it. Because it was a 48 minute video of a woman walking around an empty studio. However, the description of the performance is what sold me, calling it a “a deceptively simple performance dealing with virtual and actual space”. Like that woman in the huge mistake of a movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I want to know and understand everything, so, naturally, the phrase “deceptively simple” read as some type of challenge to me. Would I be able to understand the performance? Would I learn anything? I cleared my schedule (that is a joke, it is the summer before I go to college… we all know I’m not doing much of anything), and hunkered down in front of my computer. The performance started. What did I see? A VERY PIXELATED image of a curly-haired woman in an orange - or maybe pink - shirt, light wash jeans, and dark sneakers. The woman, Hilbertz, was walking laps around a studio, as promised. She would walk a lap in one direction, then when she got back to the camera, which would become obscured by her curls, she would turn and walk in the other direction. Sometimes, she would pick up the pace and jog some laps, but she mostly walked at an even pace. Initially, I focused on what I was seeing. I wondered if the light swooshing sound I would sometimes hear was her jeans chafing together, and if that was going to leave her thighs feeling slightly irritated after walking around for fifty minutes. I realized that Hilbertz looks like Hari Nef with curly hair, and that I think I could pick her out of a police lineup, if I had to, even if she’s aged since the video was filmed. I thought about how I hate wearing t-shirts that go over the top of my jeans, like Hilbertz was wearing because the belt loops make it bulge, which is why I only wear cropped or flowy things, or things that I can tie or tuck with jeans. I came to the conclusion that I would need to see Tilda Swinton and/or Rihanna rocking the belt loop bulge for me to rethink my stance on it. I spent a lot of my superficial thought time wondering if her shirt was pink or orange - the pixels were so whack - because if her shirt was orange, that would mean she was dressed like Bart Simpson. As I kept watching, I found myself counting Hilbertz’s paces. This is something I do instinctively when a sound has been going on for long enough. I was surprised to find that the studio was much longer than it was wide. Hilbertz would take about twenty to get from the camera to the back of the studio, but only took about five paces to cross the studio horizontally. This seemed so strange to me because the camera made the studio look pretty square. I realized how deceiving the angle that a camera is placed at can be. If the camera was on the floor, the room would have seemed long. Because the camera was placed at the height of Hilbertz’s head, the room seemed much shorter than it was. I was fooled about the size of the studio. I’m sort of angry about myself for this. I can’t believe that it took me so long to realize how warped what I was looking at was. As soon as I noticed, I also realized that she wasn’t fully occupying the entire space she was walking in. Hilbertz was not walking in a full square around the studio. She was actually walking in a triangle in order to stay in the view of the camera. The base of the triangle was along the back wall, and the two sides started at the back wall, and formed a point where the camera was placed. Suddenly, I didn’t know if I could trust a screen to show me things. The low quality of the camera reminded me that all I was looking at were pixels. And all I’m looking at right now as I type this are pixels. Every day, I am trusting pixels, which are so easy to manipulate with only a few clicks or touches to a keypad, but are also one of the most manipulative forces in the world. I reached out to Hilbertz when I realized that the intro graphic was similar to the intro graphic of The Simpsons, a blue sky with clouds and yellow writing. Between her outfit - Hilbertz confirmed that her shirt was, in fact, orange - and the graphic, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t missing some cultural commentary. She informed me that the connection was a coincidence, at least on her part, but she doesn’t know what was going through the mind of the artist that created the graphic. The funny thing is that the performance, though, which was webcast 1998, was supposed to excite viewers about the prospect of viewing stuff online. According to Hilbertz, “Live Streaming was a really new thing, and the whole series was about performance art within this new field: What could be done within the new realm of “online”?”, yet watching this video in 2017, I had the opposite reaction. Unlike today’s children, I remember the world before phones could do everything. I remember having to text on a keypad, avoiding phone calls to preserve precious minutes, and not having touch screens. I remember a world without Twitter and Instagram very well. But when it comes down to it, I am jaded when it comes to technology. “For me,” Hilbertz informed me, “[the performance] was just about a really simple, banal action like walking/running, about exploring notions of “space”: Real world, biologically feelable space, which we all experience every day; and the virtual space “inside” a computer, or within a video, and how that action and experience of movement enters a viewer’s mind.” She succeeded in making me think about space, which was actually a problem for me. When watching, I paused the video to look around my room. Then I opened my phone, and looked at my room through the lens of my phone camera. My gigantic bedroom, which I share with my sister, was dwarfed by the camera. It looked flat. I became frustrated with the screen in front of me. When Hilbertz made her webcast, the idea of live streaming videos was new and exciting. When I first found out about Periscope, which live streams through Twitter, I was so excited. I constantly tuned in to see artists I was interested in, and what they had to say. I was disappointed to find that the people Periscoping rarely ever answered interesting questions… they just self-indulgently broadcast themselves in front of a large audience while they did things like eat yogurt or play with their pets. I deleted Periscope and haven’t looked back. Now, you can live stream on Instagram, and I get notifications about people broadcasting themselves on a daily basis. I know what it feels like to be excited about webcasting, but I am now immune to the excitement. It’s like when iPhones first got a front camera. Selfies were so new, so cool. Years later, they’re aggressively mundane. People are desensitized towards them. Screens are entertaining. No, duh. I don’t want to think about how many hours of my childhood I spent on a computer playing The Sims 3. Hundreds, if not thousands. They are helpful. I remember when the iPhone just came out, there was some story in the news about some guy who was stuck in a cave and used an iPhone app on First Aid to save himself. They are revolutionary, as shown by the “Pseudo Studio Walk” performance. You can witness things, even if you aren’t there. You can Skype in to witness big family moments when you’re geographically separated. It’s quite awesome. Screens can help you capture memories that will last forever (or at least until you lose every picture on your phone... or until all technology gets hacked and ceases to work, haha). But they’re also scary! Ahhhh! Hear me out. Your devices are helping big data companies collect information on you, which is helpful for you, I guess, but also creepy, and leaves you open to be manipulated by advertisements. Screens are so addictive that people are risking their lives to stay on them at all times: almost 330,000 accidents occur every year because of texting and driving, despite all the laws against it. And lest we forget the whole government spying revelations that have come about recently! All of this is coming from a girl who has a 605 day Snapchat streak, meaning I have gone 605 days in a row without not going on my phone. I, too, am a slave to my phone. I don’t mean to take away from Hilbertz’s performance by saying all of this. She did an excellent job of making me think about digital space, which is what lead me into my little tirade on technology. I would almost like to see the performance simulated with computer-generated images, as well. I suppose I could do it myself on The Sims if I turned Free Will off. That would give a new meaning to digital space, I suppose, as the space would be digitally simulated. What I was most impressed by with Hilbertz’s performance was how quickly time elapsed while watching it. My initial attitude when starting this video was “Great, a 50 minute video of someone walking laps” but the next thing I knew, I went to pause it to write down some thoughts, and saw that eight minutes had flown by. When she would jog, time seemed to move slower - each lap took a shorter time to complete, so when she would finish, and I’d see the time on the screen, not that much time had elapsed. The fast laps caused me anxiety because it felt like time was moving so slowly. It’s odd and interesting that while time moves quickly for one person, the same chunk of time could move slowly to another person. In ontology, realists believe that time and space exists outside of the mind. I’m kind of an anti-realist and while I do believe that there are things that exist outside of the mind, I don’t think that time and space exist independent of the mind. I think all of this is relevant when considering the effectiveness of this piece of performance art, as it deals with both space and time. Hilbertz successfully brings the mind to the topics of space and time in her piece, and it’s making me trip out just a little bit. I’m unsure of whether or not that was the intended, but I just ordered myself a book on the philosophy of space and time as a result of writing and thinking about this performance. I’d like to take this time to thank Halona Hilbertz for responding to my email about this piece and giving me a lot to think about. Thank you!