Homefront explores the effects of media-security culture on subjectivity and self-identification.  It suggests that surveillance, monitoring, and tracking technologies are media of self-reflection and self-awareness, as well as media of control.  In an increasingly militarized culture, there is a reciprocity between the way that control technologies function and the way that identity coalesces. 

Homefront performs an analysis of spectatorship and identification that is resonant with the new regime of security:  a landscape of computer-aided observational networks that filters into the imaginary in unexpected ways, and which generates new forms of agency.  A landscape of reciprocal vision and multiple temporality, where viewpoints alternate between optical systems.  A landscape in which one is both seer and seen -- the subject and the object of perception.  In this sense Homefront performs a kind of allegory for the "security unconscious" of a vigilant citizenry. 

We begin and end with the monitor and the mirror.  The stage is set for potential crime and confrontation.  Two actors appear, a man and a woman, who evoke popular filmic stereotypes.  They engage in an elaborately mediatized pas de deux.  The actors are desirous of each other but their actions are infused with a presumptive suspicion.  They analyze and deceive one another -- and themselves -- as they both solicit and block erotic contact.  Circulating within the potent mixes of contemporary entertainment and security cultures, they embody mutually reinforcing mechanisms of pleasure and paranoia. 

There are 3 visual regimes in which they are depicted. The first is that of reality television, particularly of the live-action crime TV variety, which combines both policing and voyeuristic entertainment. The second is that of panoptic surveillance, which transforms urban space into a site of potential crime. The third is a military gaze, evoked through tactical observation methods, night vision technology, and image processing software. The reality-representation dynamic of each of these three visual regimes – reality media, policing, and military – is reflected in the identities and interpersonal dynamics of the two actors.  That is, the conditions of each regime fuels reality, identity, and action in integral ways -- and this dynamic feeds into the interactions, interior worlds, and fantasmatic supports of the actors.  As these visual regimes are "subjectivized," their formats and conventions combine, and a new logic of representation is generated.

In this way, Homefront traffics between the formal, infrastructural, and psychological levels.  It is not only about these actors, but the representational systems through which they identify and are identified.  The actors are engaged in a continual process of projection and identification via the separation, confrontation, and re-appropriation of their images as “others.”  The actors try to “know” each other and themselves in the same way that we try to know something through these representations.  

Like us, the actors are haunted by the substrata of the Real.  They struggle with its impossible assimilation.  As the actors move toward a new identity ecology, the structure of the video reflects a new spatiotemporal order.