Zoom Face: Self-Surveillance, Performance and Display

ABSTRACT

This article examines the concepts of ‘zoom gaze’ and ‘zoom fatigue’ as two recently theorised consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. It considers how the dramatic shift in people’s social and professional interactions, from face-to-face communication to virtual interaction via videoconferencing software such as Zoom, produces new ways of reading, understanding, surveilling, and performing through, and with the face. It argues that these myriad changes necessitate a return to prior theories of the close-up, the cinematic face, and even the face of literature and portraiture to better understand the long-term implications of videoconferencing at a personal and collective level. It considers the affective and cognitive processes that are engaged during moments of cinematic ‘close-up’ to ask whether existing theories of the facial close-up in artistic fields might shed light on the psychological and psychosocial effects of seeing oneself and others’ faces for extended periods in the digital milieu. The article also attends to self-surveillance as a constitutive element of the ‘zoom gaze’ to consider how we might resist the extractive control imposed by videoconferencing software as a now ubiquitous and arguably essential component of life during and after the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• zoom
• face
• surveillance
• virtual communication
• gaze
• cinema
• performance
• display

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant no DP200101325].