peter campus Sees the Self in Video

To see yourself takes a lifetime. But if you want a shortcut, stand before the closed circuit camera of peter campus’s 1973 installation piece Anamnesis, and it will project you onto the wall. For a brief moment, according to campus, you’ll be “at the same time this image and this self.” On a daily basis, so many of us are the stars of security cameras and various live feeds that we often routinely enact such doubling, but Anamnesis adds a third layer. Via a three-second delay, it projects your present self and past self simultaneously, one blurring the other, so that no self gets the final say. Seeing this, I realized that I’ve always been three: viewer, viewed, and the victim of nostalgic impulse. The installation made all three visible at once for the first time.