There are many things in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window that make Paramount Studios look less like Greenwich Village than an arrangement of dollhouses: a skyline flat like cardboard, perfect little clouds, imitation bricks, and awnings that may or may not be plastic. The film’s direction does little to discourage this impression. We peer through the windows of tenements with enough distance to render their inhabitants figurine-like. Maybe this much had occurred to Nam June Paik when he found a maquette of an apartment building on the streets of New York, mounted monitors in its windows, and set them to play scenes from Rear Window on repeat. He even stationed a doll-size Hitchcock at the entrance, his features rubbed back to the simplicity of a toy soldier. Paik makes smaller the already small-seeming. Consequently, the gravity of a murder mystery turns diminutive, smothered by a cute kind of artifice. This is not necessarily a defiant gesture vis-à-vis the film. Paik may actually bring forward a quality with which Hitchcock is already playing. Rear Window is a thriller, but it denies the absorption we associate with a genre hellbent on intensity and emotional reaction. Its drama is instead held at a certain remove.

In other words, Paik magnifies the film’s central effects: disconnect and the feeling of looking in from the outside. Laden with a cast on his broken leg, Rear Window’s protagonist L.B. Jeffries can do little more than watch his neighbors while he recovers (reading a book does not occur to him). When visitors walk through his front door and see him surveying the courtyard with binoculars, they call him names like “window shopper” and “peeping tom.” He is reduced to the contemptible status of voyeur. But at least he has his binoculars—and even a camera with a telephoto lens—to bridge the divide. Those that look at Paik’s sculpture have no such recourse. His monitors are too small for us to watch them comfortably. Some are even set on a perpendicular axis, daring us to get on all fours and cock our heads (the disgrace!). Ultimately, one is left with the dissatisfaction of multiplied removal. We watch people watching people and look through windows at those who are looking through windows.

Paik denies us the revelatory power of Jeffreis’s voyeurism (which, after all, uncovers the murderous plot of neighbor Lars Thorwald), and yet he also suggests that the voyeur may not actually have such special access. Jeffreis is plagued by doubt and suspicion, pushed onward by the gaps in his understanding and the feeling that he hasn’t seen enough. Something similar happens when we look into dollhouses. We may think we have intimate acquaintance with the miniatures inside, but the stories they tell don’t quite add up. Their expressions are ambivalent or even impenetrable; the scenes on display refuse to resolve, locked in a moment of uncertainty. Maybe this is why John Mack, in The Art of Small Things, wrote that such things “resist final possession” and “evade complete comprehension.” They have, instead, an “inherent mystery.” The more at-hand they seem, the harder it is to grasp them.

Paik may be telling us something very straightforward: Don’t believe what you see, especially if you are desperate to see it. Scopophilia makes perception unreliable, a contradiction that haunts Hitchcock’s film as well. Even if a confession confirms that Thorwald is guilty of the murder Jeffreis suspects, all evidence is to the contrary. The flower bed that should have human remains yields only dirt. The large trunk, suspiciously bound with rope, is full of well-folded clothing. By the end of the film, one can feel that Thorwald is the victim of Jeffries’s transgression. When Thorwald finally confronts his peeping tom, his face cast in shadow but eyes set in a square of light, one gets the sense that the watched knows the watcher better than the watcher does the watched. The real protagonists in Rear Window might be the heavy lids that droop over Jeffreis’s owns eyes, like curtains that obscure the drama he witnesses. He sees like one looking into a dollhouse, his view partial, frustrated, never consummate, compelling him to infer—a risky business. Paik turns this doubt into outright confusion. Ten simultaneous monitors should provide ten times the opportunity to make sense of the scenes on display, but for obvious reasons the reverse is true. Vision loses focus and narrative turns scattershot.

Before there was social media, Paik anticipated how looking in on the lives of others connects people through precisely the opposite: distance, misunderstanding, and projection. When Jeffreis’s nurse laments the way “we’ve become a race of peeping toms,” one can imagine Paik nodding in agreement. His digital monitors are tools with which we watch instead of look, perception contingent on desire—a phenomenon well known to be grounded in the feeling of lack. John Locke once urged children to play with dollhouses instead of each other on the filthy streets of London. If there had been binoculars, telephoto lenses, or iPhones, he made have found them equally good alternatives. All are what Susan Stewart, in her discussion of dollhouses, described as both “sanctuary (fantasy)” and “prison.”

Paik’s version of Rear Window may also have its own rear window—one more ghastly and noirish than Hitchcock’s. Peer into the back of the sculpture at your own peril. It is a chaos of cables, splintered plywood, nails, memory cards, power strips, adhesive, and zip ties, unsystematic and grotesque. For those of us inclined to picture electronic media as well-organized, like a circuit board or a sequence of zeroes and ones, Paik insists on the absence of a higher power that orders such components. To use the words of Jeffreis’s love interest Lisa, the sculpture looks “diseased,” perverted by virulent entropy. Maybe this is why looking at Rear Window in San Francisco is particularly hair-raising. What kind misshapen, insidious digital infrastructure lurks behind the city’s half-vacant facades? What ugliness would we find if we looked through its rear windows? One begins to question the reality of the city’s skyline, its perfect little clouds, its Painted Ladies. Maybe the billionaires were right—this is all a simulation. But maybe this simulation would be better described as a dollhouse.

• Zully Adler