Inside-Out (1976),

performance, Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco) basement. With street access for spectators, surveillance video, light box, mice housed in aquarium.

Scott lives in the basement and makes annotations on paper of spectator, performer and mice movements on a daily basis, for five working days.1

“Outside on the pavement there was a line and an arrow pointing to the middle of a basement window. People passing by on the street were able to see a small video camera installed in the window and if they looked through the viewfinder, they saw some type of drawing taking place. If they were curious they could follow the line from this pavement which travelled along the pavement and into a basement area.

Inside the basement a figure was busy drawing on tracing paper on the ground and after each drawing was finished, she was placing these drawings on a wall illuminated by lights. The figure was drawing in front of a window, which look back out onto the street, and on the floor under the window stood an aquarium full of mice.

Through a series of drawings the figure was comparing the movement of the mice with the movement of the people cars and traffic on the street, notating who was curious enough to stop and look in. The performance took place from 9-5 on workdays for one month.”2

Also shown in Video Free America Presents: Videos by Jill Scott (1978)

1Scott, Characters of Motion, 1980, p.24. See also Scott, Coded Characters, 2003, pp.64-65, [the year is wrong in this].

2Scott: from http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/inside-out/ or from the Google cache of her (now deleted) ZKM homepage.