Susan Snipes
Now Streaming: Someone Else’s Life
10-channel video installation; PVC, smartphones, tablets, cables
6 x 4 x 3 ft.
2025
Now Streaming: Someone Else’s Life invites viewers into a quiet loop of observation. Constructed from black PVC pipe and outfitted with ten smartphones and tablets, the installation displays videos of people watching other people. As they recline in bed or sit cross-legged in a playroom, the subjects in each video hold their phone or tablet—absorbed, still, elsewhere. Each clip of gamer footage or product unboxing casts someone else’s life into the observer’s intimate space. This arrangement creates a hall of mirrors: watchers watching watchers, attention absorbed and redirected until presence becomes diffuse. The installation lingers in that melancholy space between connection and detachment, where experience is no longer firsthand but filtered, flattened, and fed back. Layering digital and emotional distance, Now Streaming sketches a portrait of contemporary life where comfort and alienation quietly overlap. In a world wired for endless viewing, what happens to the self that is always watching but rarely participating?
Artist Statement
Texts, emails, voicemails, social chats, and other digital messages inundate me daily blurring the line between “in real life” (IRL) and virtual connections. Technologies proclaiming to connect frequently leave me feeling isolated and overwhelmed. My work explores the dissonance between how digital culture amplifies our longing for intimacy while complicating how we relate to others and ourselves. Working across installation, video, and sound, I create immersive environments that invite reflection on the quality of our communications. I’m interested in the spaces between presence and absence, connection and distance, and how we might reclaim more intentional, embodied ways of relating in an increasingly mixed reality world.
Artist Bio
Susan Snipes is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cleveland, Ohio, whose media installations respond to the anxieties and disconnection of the digital age. Working with video, sound, digital devices, and ephemera, and often incorporating interactive elements, she creates immersive spaces that invite reflection and dialogue. Her work encourages audiences to explore their own roles within an interconnected reality where virtual and physical boundaries are increasingly blurred.
Susan holds an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in Art History from Case Western Reserve University. Susan has exhibited nationally with recent highlights including the CAN Triennial, “YOU ARE HERE” at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio and The Listener’s Gallery in San Antonio, Texas. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Collective Arts Network Journal and The Earthkeepers Handbook, curated by Kim Abeles and Whitefeather Hunter.
An active advocate for her community, Susan founded NEO Art Opportunities to connect Northeast Ohio artists with grants, exhibitions, and other resources. She also established UNDERSTORY, a contemporary art space in Cleveland dedicated to showcasing emerging conceptual and media artists, with the goal of making art more accessible to the public.