Jane and Louise Wilson shot the film for their video installation Gamma (1999) at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, home to the former United States Air Force base until it was decommissioned in 1992. During the 1980s thousands of women activists gathered at Greenham Common to protest against nuclear armaments; they establishedand maintained a Women’s Peace Camp there for almost 20 years. The film shot on 16mm shows the traces of time that have been stored in the abandoned complex of buildings. The installation inspects the spaces of inspection and surveils control rooms and security zones, taking us off-limits into “untouchable” spaces of power. Architectural details reveal structures of authority, decoding a paranoid mentality of surveillance and control. The Wilsons’ research draws on devices featured in film noir: skewed angle shots, mirroring, and sudden bursts of sound. Filmed shortly after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, the installation short-circuits military strategies of surveillance and control, giving rise to a corporeal, immersive, cinematic encounter.

Gamma consists of two pairs of floor-to-ceiling wall projections meeting at 90-degree angles positioned in opposite corners. This architectural layout – two points of view shown simultaneously and bound together – mirrors a psychic architecture. In the middle of the installation, we encounter a diversity of perspectives, changes between subjective (what the figures sees) and objective (what the camera sees) suggestive tracking shots, and film sequences that involve mirroring and doubling. Like in the eye of a hurricane, surrounded and disorientated we find ourselves confronted with architecture in which every movement is regulated by military scrutiny.