Abstract: This chapter foregrounds the presence of video technology in shaping the milieu where desire emerges. I interrogate the milieu we share with video technology to foreground an ecology of desiring, desired, and desirable relations to performative technology. Moving beyond the psychological model applied to video and its aesthetics of narcissism, this chapter looks at both dispersive and penetrating video images to account for the flesh in subversive ways. I do so by looking at an historical moment: the demolition of the last women's jail in Paris portrayed in Nicole Croiset, Judy Blum, and Nil Yalter's collective work La Roquette, prison de femmes from 1974, and by comparatively approaching two video installations: Mona Hatoum's Corps étranger from 1994 and Thierry Kuntzel's La Peau from 2007. Dispersive and penetrating modes of video existence foreground the necessity to think about desire in relation to the milieu where images, objects, and subjects cohabit.

Keywords: desire, video, technology, Mona Hatoum, Nil Yalter, Thierry Kuntzel

Perhaps the work of art (the work art does) has never been anything other than life worked on, through, and by a certain intention.