“Primal human curiosity to know, and to know those aspects of others’ lives that we are not supposed to know. As a transgressive act, eavesdropping not only draws attention to the ever-more fragile boundaries between public and private space, but also to larger divisions: between self and others.”
In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, sociologist Erving Goffman demonstrates how we all perform in various guises and to different groups of people, as if we were on stage. We preserve our “backstage” selves as an essential part of our identity – and it is this protected part of our personality that we attempt to mask, while harboring a strong desire to penetrate those of others. So eavesdropping is both one of the most tempting and yet most reviled of human activities.
The act of overhearing the sound inside of pipe, leading viewers into the spaces and times of one’s own experience of being heard or overhearing others.