Surveillance fills our lives, leaving humans collage pieces on a tableau. That topic, and its increasing relevance, were at the center of a gallery talk Saturday at the Rose Art Museum led by Michael Rush, the museum's director and the curator of the exhibit "Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art." Rush began by explaining that the exhibit, which runs until Dec. 17 in the Mildred S. Lee Gallery and Lois Foster Wing, is important to the Rose because it presents "a variety of cultural and intellectual experiences." He said the title takes off on the idiom "balance is power," but that it also carries a deeper meaning. Balance is extremely important to the performer in video art, he said, while the power of surveillance gives the camera and the people behind it complete power over others.

Red balloons dominate the Lee Gallery, generating a playful atmosphere. Rush described the conflict in this piece: Aesthetic pleasure can detract from "pointing us towards the dark side of technology." In fact, the balloons represent an early type of surveillance used in the Civil War, when both sides attempted to use them to spy on one another. Rush believes the piece's power stems from the fact that "it seduces you with a fun aspect, and then leads you to think about darker elements."

Rush gave deeper meaning to every single piece in the exhibit. In the Lois Foster Wing, he detailed the various pods: large screens each showing a different video. Arranged asymmetrically, the disoriented view warranted Rush's description of "cacophony." The layout also was hoped to create a "sense of invitation and thought," according to Rush.

Rush constantly highlighted the significance of the history of video art to the current phenomenon of reality television. Jonas Mekas' "Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol" paid homage to its namesake's relationship to celebrity culture. This fascination led Rush to dub Warhol "the grandfather of reality TV."

Small untitled televisions in the center of the room displayed various images, including a man pointing, on which Rush elaborated. One had to remember, he said, that the man is not pointing at the viewer, but at the camera, reminding us that much as we think we are a part of what is on TV, it actually is acted for a camera.

A more interactive aspect of the exhibit that Rush mentioned was Kevin Hamilton's "Mirror Site (Back-to-Back)," in which Web cams have been placed in the Shapiro Campus Center and in the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Through this exhibit, students from each school can see each other passing through central spaces.

Rush believes the purpose of the entire exhibit was to emphasize the "love-hate, and sometimes even erotic" quality of the relationship between our society and the camera. He pointed out that sometimes we love it and are excited to be seen on television, yet at other, more sensitive times, such as weddings, we become upset that a camera is following us around. The exhibit emphasizes that we are always on display before the camera that is the rest of society.