Moving carefully amidst the shadows of a construction site, two men, armed with weapons, play an elaborate cat-and-mouse game. Each of their moves is made with the utmost care: the tiniest gesture, the slightest snap of wood under foot, could make them vulnerable to each other. They move in a hypervigilant condition, their senses heightened in a dance of detection and deception. Each actor is aligned within the other's "sights," only to escape the line of fire. Hunter becomes hunted.

The camera, too, is armed. Since the advent of cinema, and through the highly sophisticated combat systems of today, it is a weapon in the staging of its own kind of war. Loaded with "artillery" and aimed to shoot, capture, and encode, it too is a role player in the game. When its trigger is pressed, what kind of occupation does it stage? How does its own type of seeing and capturing combine with that of its subjects? Trigger is a video installation that combines eye, camera, and weapon in a psycho-physiology of combat. It is shot with 16mm film and video from surveillance cameras and military targeting systems. It also uses an eye-tracked synchronization system, which automatically aligns weapon and human gaze. In this case, seeing literally does become firing. With such increasingly automated tracking systems, the status of the "seer" is an open question. Is the camera-weapon manned or unmanned, and where is the body that connects to its viewfinder? As humans become ever more closely integrated with machines, the boundaries are not so easy to draw. Trigger is intended to evoke how we are changing - in form, behavior, and visual orientation - as those changes are connected to the domestication and corporealization of warfare technology.

At the core of the project is the cluster of eye, viewfinder, and trigger. It is that place where body and machine meet in a physical or psychological "switch" of some kind, ready for an act of engagement. In this sense, a trigger is not a specific object so much as a metaphor for an activation center between perception, technology, and the pacings of the body.

The setting of Trigger is a construction site in mid-state of development. Its strewn construction materials, scaffoldings, rubble, and general disarray also connotes a war zone. It evokes the role that all of these technologies - whether military or cinematic - play in the fortification and reshaping of everyday space. In order to emphasize this connection, formats from commercial tracking, mapping, and modeling programs are included, along with recognizable construction tools.

Flowing between the high-tech machinery of the military and the lush sensuality of film, Trigger emphasizes the militarized dimensions of everyday constructed, inhabited space even as it sensualizes those readings. Focusing on the symbolic, sensorial, and psychological dimensions of warfare, one gets the sense that the combat scenes between the two characters are an elaborate dance, a seduction as much as a hunt. Eye framed by viewfinder and finger pulsing with tension against the trigger of camera-gun, the combat device surges through the body in a way that is not so easy to categorize. Suspended within a condition of hypervigilance, physiology, technology, and erotic gaze are joined. Line of fire combines with line of desire.