Jordan Crandall is one of the most innovative authors in the field of electronic and surveillance art, with acclaimed projects such as DRIVE, HEATSEAKING and the latest TRIGGER, will give a lecture on his work and artistic strategies in the MAT - NEW MEDIA LECTURE SERIES on Wednesday, November 19, 2003 in the Arts Building, 534, E-STUDIO classroom.
Mr. Crandall is currently assistant professor in the UCSD Art Department, and his work has been widely exhibited and distributed, among others at documenta X in Kassel, Artlab Canon and the ZKM in Karlsruehe. He is also the editor of BLAST.

Surveillance, monitoring, and tracking technologies are not only media of
control; they are media of self-reflection and self-awareness.  There is a reciprocity between the way that control technologies function and the way that identity coalesces.  Entertainment media (including the news) play a large role in this dynamic.

Homefront is a 3-channel video installation. There are two actors, a man and a woman, inside a reality-television set modeled on a typical suburban home.  The roles they play are not stable: they switch identities and they also take on other roles that evoke the relation between actor and audience, or reality and representation. 

There are 3 camera modes in which they are depicted. The first is a reality television mode, particularly of the live-action crime TV variety, which combines both policing and voyeuristic entertainment. The second is video surveillance. The third is a military gaze, evoked through tactical observation methods and image processing software. The reality- representation dynamic of each of these three realms - reality media, policing, and military - is reflected in the identities and interpersonal dynamics of the two characters.  That is, the conditions of each medium fuel reality, identity, and action in integral ways, and these conditions inform the interactions, interior worlds, and fantasmatic supports of the characters.  In this way, Homefront traffics between the formal, infrastructural, and psychological levels.  It is not only about these characters, but the representational systems through which they identify and are identified.  The actors are engaged in a continual process of projection and identification via the separation, confrontation, and re-appropriation of their images as "others."  The actors try to "know" each other and themselves in the same way that we try to know something through these representations. 

Within the climate of contemporary security discourses, I am interested in the mechanisms of desire, suspicion, and fear.  The other as object of desire or as "suspect."  The actors are desirous of each other but their actions are infused with a presumptive suspicion. Everyday actions carry ominous overtones; the stage is set for potential crime. A criminal unconscious takes hold, mediated by the conditions of observation.  The actors analyze, deceive, and solicit one another (and themselves). They engage in pre-emptive strikes against one another, in a way that is paralleled by the temporal "buffering" of predictive technology. 

The flows between the dynamics of the actors and the conditions of representation are exacerbated in the ebb and flow of the actor's seduction- combat. The character action leads up to a singular act of violence, in a way that reveals the conditions of the media and its underlying supports. The conflict is exteriorized.  New fortifications arise.

From the book " Molecular Invasion" Critical Art Ensemble - 2002

Brian Springer is a media artist whose work explores ways in which new communications technologies redefine notions of public, private and nation. Springer's work uses these shifting definitions to access images, sounds and data in what are traditionally considered closed systems of power. Springer has worked as a spectrum researcher with Projekt Atol's Makrolab and collaborated with Marko Peljhan on audio and theater projects. One of Springer's best-known projects is /Spin/ , a one-hour documentary that details the events of 1992 through the satellite backhauls providing unpackaged and uncensored news feeds, ones that viewers do not see as part of the final news program. Springer will screen /Spin/, as well as other video projects during his lecture. Springer studied media art at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In Buffalo, he worked with other artists to co-found community organizations supporting the production of media art (Squeaky Wheel) and public-access cable. Springer also will present research on some fields of inquiry he has been exploring since leaving Buffalo.