The use of smart video doorbells heavily increased over the past few years, but what are the ethics behind this? And what happens if we are constantly being filmed, with the possibility to find ourselves on the internet?
‘YOUR DOORSTEP, MY STAGE’ is an interactive music video installation, in which you can explore these questions through an abstract experience, based on bodily movement.

A digital system distributes and distorts imagery of viral doorbell videos collected from the internet over a set of nine screens. A distance sensor captures the visitor’s bodily position in space and their movements. Based on this data, the visual output on each screen is influenced. Different types of movements have different meanings, resulting in unique abstractions.  In this arrangement, the sensor symbolises a smart doorbell. The network of screens, together with the coded system behind it, symbolises the digital algorithms in which doorbell videos get rinsed on the road to virality.

In the research conducted for this project, ‘the dramaturgical theory’ by Erving Goffman was used to analyse the hybrid phenomena of smart video doorbells. This theory was extended and layered with other sources by Noah Kasanardjo and brought together into a pop-style magazine publication named ‘Video doorbells and our Behaviour’.

The interaction with this installation reflects how human behaviour nowadays relates to virality, when standing in front of a smart video doorbell.

You become the actor, the doorstep the décor. Welcome to your stage.