Room of One’s Own

The art piece that I want to talk about is “Room of One’s Own by Lynn Hershman”, it is the one where you look into this scope and move the handle to see this tiny bedroom inside. On the left shows a reflection of your eye and as it begins, the woman on the background starts asking you “why are you here?” or say “hello” which I found really creepy because you are looking at your eyeball which is on a television. As you move the handle around the room, the perspective changes and along it changes the sound effects/music which was really fascinating. This piece really stood out to me because I believe that the artist wants us to reflect on why we are looking into this dark and creepy bedroom as if we are watching or peeping something we should not. In a way I believe that the artist wants to show how media portrays and objectifies women into a sexual object or what they consider a beautiful woman which looks like a model or someone photoshopped to have the perfect image while asking why. I also think it reflects how digitalized we are today by how we are able to see a lot of things on this tiny box we call our phones. I think this art piece really reflects one of Claire Bishop’s points in the digital divide where she stated that digital art “suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of virtual age and its impact on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication; each articulates something of troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance that characterizes our new technological regime, and proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued”. In this excerpt, the author is stating that nowadays we have access to a lot of information and like the Room of One’s Own piece, we often struggle to see or measure how reliant or attached we are to the virtual world.