I am watching me, watching you.

Soon I'll move on, and someone else will watch me, watching you, too. Unless he finds himself watching himself, watching me.

"On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers," now at the Phillips Museum of Art in the Steinman College Center, Franklin & Marshall College, is an exhibit in flux.

The concept remains the same, but the execution varies, depending on what you do and who is there at the time.

James Coupe, a former F&M postdoctoral fellow and the artist behind the multi-room installation, derives his theme from the line, "I am being observed," from the final entry in a character's diary in the Friedrich Durrenmatt novella, "The Assignment."

"Given the ubiquity of social media, cell phone cameras, webcams and YouTube, is the experience of being observed confirmation that one's life is significant, or is it an intrusion to be avoided at all costs?" Coupe asks in his artist's statement

I'm not sure the exhibit answers the question, but it does give people a chance to ponder the way they behave on film.

Or, as a young woman discovered while viewing a real-time loop of herself, it's a perfect opportunity to check your hair and makeup.

There are seven rooms in the exhibit area, each offering a different perspective on the view within.

There's a waiting room. There are empty chairs around a table littered with papers for an experiment in perception. There's a classroom. There's a chapel.

In each room, as well as the hallways connecting them, there are cameras to capture your movements and monitors that display the action, only some of which exist in real time.

Documentation suggests the footage is reorganized through computer algorithms and displayed as a multi-channel film.

In other words, you might see yourself sitting there, looking at yourself on a screen. You might see other people moving through the halls -- past or present, it's hard to say -- or maybe yourself, as you were just a few moments before.

A bank of screens in one room, for instance, occasionally showed someone walking through the door behind me. Each time, I glanced over my shoulder to see if someone was there -- but no, it was a video memory.

A few moments later the screen changed to show a different person coming in -- and this time, the person was really there. The repeating loop had reset itself in timely fashion.

It's interesting to watch how people react to seeing themselves on screen. Some people ignore the camera, others wave or make faces. One fellow, in a bulky blue jacket, focused his attention on a screen in front of him, but his eyes kept sliding over to check out his profile instead.

It's also easy to wander off map.

During my visit, one door led to a student photographing antiquities -- she was not, she quickly noted, part of the tour, although the map provided clearly included that room. After a few more visitors meandered into her work space, she closed the door, blocking access to the banks of monitors within.

Museum director Eliza Riley's office, which she apparently sacrificed to the exhibit, is also open to explore. She wasn't there during my visit, and some patrons -- myself included -- hesitated at the door, unsure if we were intruding on her privacy. Some opted for discretion and went elsewhere without venturing inside. The bolder among us found yet another set of cameras and screens; while I was there, not much was going on in that space.

Coupe developed the concept after reading a story describing Lancaster as one of the most-watched cities in the United States, with a network of more than 165 cameras observing its 55,000 residents. Commissioned by the Phillips Museum, "On the Observing" is the first of a series of four surveillance-themed installations that Coupe will exhibit this year in New York, Seattle and Toronto.

The F&M exhibit runs to April 7.

"On the Observing of the Observer

of the Observers"

Cont. through April 7

Tues.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

(until 6:30 p.m. on First Fridays)

Sat. and Sun. 12:30-4:30 p.m. Free

Phillips Museum of Art

Steinman College Center

F&M College, 291-3879

www.fandm.edu/phillipsmuseum

tknapp@lnpnews.com