Fumiaki Murakami (Faculty of Art, University of Tsukuba) published a paper titled “Aesthetics of Peeping: A Consideration of the perceptual structures of visual devices with peeping forms from a media archaeological perspective” in the journal Environmental Art (No. 36) of the Society for Environmental Art.
Overview
This research clarifies human attitudes toward peeping visual devices and elucidates their perceptual structures and the social structures related to perception, serving as a foundation for analyzing contemporary art works featuring “peeping” forms from the twentieth century onward.
The analysis centers on eighteenth and nineteenth-century engravings collected by Richard Balzer (1944–2017) and included in Peepshows: A Visual History (1998). Rather than focusing on the devices themselves, the study examines figures depicted around the devices. Of 171 images with duplicates removed, 132 depicting surrounding circumstances were classified and analyzed.
As a result, the structure of peeping was organized from the following three perspectives:
Vision and Desire — People lined up at the device, aware that the image obtained is not reality, desire their gaze to expand as an illusion. Viewers monopolize hidden visual information alone and experience an absolute viewpoint through the “infallible metaphysical eye” provided by optical instruments. This desire is not limited to sexual obscenity but is understood as human desire in a broader sense.
Unstable Perceptual Experience — From engravings depicting the purse of a peeper being stolen and from those where the interior and exterior of the device are depicted in reverse, one can discern both the physical situation of isolation from the real world through immersion in the device and the epistemological meaning that “peeping is inherently susceptible to deception.” A doubly unstable perceptual experience is established in both the actual act of peeping and the act of perceiving the internal image.
Subordination to Machinery and Integration into Capitalist Society — Engravings of people in close contact with devices reveal scenes in which humans are subordinated and incorporated into machinery rather than being the subject. The feudal hierarchy and propagandistic structures existing between showmen and viewers are concealed from the recipients.
From these findings, it is clarified that “peeping” at visual devices originates from the distance between the visual characteristic of “viewing” and the physical apparatus. Simultaneously, it is demonstrated that while dealing with vision, the perceptual characteristics of social structures are concealed, making it possible to discuss the mechanisms of human social structures.