Jordan Crandall has the mind of a pragmatist and the heart of a utopian. With astonishing breadth and rare lucidity, he calls upon psychoanalysis, film theory, semiotics, and demography to expose the insidious political and economic forces that structure and control the body-image-machine complex.
While sketching a chilling image of the intersection of the ascendant database paradigm with military technology and globalized commerce, Crandall does not succumb to cynicism or fashionable passivity, but presents an urgent case for the possibility of new identity formations and agencies.
In his art, writing, and editorial work, Crandall has fashioned a critically important survival guide to the emerging present.
Curator of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum, New York
In Drive, Jordan Crandall boldly re-figures the fundamental metaphors guiding our interactions with digital media, including pages,
nodes,
and links.
He adopts instead the idea of a differentiated field that includes computers, networks, users and physical spaces. Working from this premise, he shows how the metaphor of the vehicle, imagined both as a transportation device and as a semiotic-linguistic entity, can be used to re-think our embodied relation to inscription technologies and particularly to digital media. Richly imagined and powerfully argued, this book has the potential to revolutionize our discourses about media and consequently the possibilities we can envision for them -- and for us.
Author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Professor of English and Media Arts, UCLA
Between machine vision and a database, between art world, critical theory and new media, between a screen and a mobile vehicle, between art practice, writing and net-dialog, between the network and the cinematic, between theory and visual poetry -- Jordan Crandall's works strike at the most critical conceptual knots of our computer culture. Add to this his systematic pioneering of new forms of structuring cultural debates and generating projects, and it is easy to see why his overall artistic trajectory is unique and his individual contributions always push the envelope. This book, which combines projects, essays, and interviews, is a wonderful result of his relentless drive to make sense of new modes of vision, representation and existence in a post-Net world -- and a gift for anybody interested in the present.
Author of The Language of New Media
Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
Jordan Crandall demonstrates and examines the centrality of artistic practices to understandings of networked societies, developing an engaged and analytic critique of both. Drive traces the development of Crandall's work, both in the context of his participation in the seminal Blast series and in his developing engagement with, on the one hand, path-breaking installation art and, on the other, the collective generation of critical knowledge through online discussion. Working in key sites of modern cultures -- technology, sex, bodies, cyberspace, oppressions -- Crandall develops work of essential interest to anyone concerned with artistic practices or the world as we currently live in it. Drive is thinking at its finest.
Author of Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet
founding editor, Social Movement Studies
Jordan Crandall's online forum of 1998 -- <eyebeam><blast>: Artistic Practice in the Network -- was among the richest and most moving experiences of a critical yet lyrical, public yet intimate dialog I have ever experienced. It convinced me that conversation could truly be an important art form -- given a moderator with Crandall's skills, goals and intensities to create a framework for it. This is the kind of art we need more than ever. Drive places this forum into the context of years of collaborative work on the Net, from the Blast series to Crandall's individually-produced video installations. What characterizes this important work as a whole is its grand human scale and its attention to new phenomenologies of embodiment and subjective experience. In Drive, Crandall makes a realm of surveillance technologies that operate largely below the threshold of conscious awareness felt in erotic choreographies and rhythmic uses of imagery. Fresh theoretical categories emerge out of this art.
Author of Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture
Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California Santa Cruz
As both artist and media scholar, Jordan Crandall has consistently demonstrated how technology, the media, and our corporeality have become intricately and inextricably enmeshed. In this significant volume, Crandall straddles Virilio and Schopenhauer especially when he approximates the packet structure of our contemporaneity through the brevity of the aphorism. A most welcome contribution to our understanding of the confluence of technology and culture today.
Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Drive resists either cybernetic or science fiction scripts for digital culture that often invite an indulgence in parallel or recursive realities. For Jordan Crandall, digital devices are simply a new set of interfaces and switches in the larger colloidal field of everything else, and so they are about the material within which they are embedded -- our bodies, our larger marketplaces and networks, and our daily theaters of operation. Discussed as animations or activities, as verbs rather than nouns, these technologies are passages between interior and exterior rhythms,
and they both ventriloquize and receive life beyond their own boundaries and capabilities. However invisible the may be, they are the measured by the huge spaces they calibrate, spaces controlled by commerce, by the military and by millions of other voices. These very spaces that are both intrinsic and extrinsic to the digital are Crandall's sites, not only discussed but occupied, in installations, objects, on-line forums, essays and special publications.
Author of Organization Space
Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Yale University
Jordan Crandall is an artist, writer, critic, editor and digital agent provocateur.
This publication assembles, for the first time, his dynamic and critical interventions into the worlds of art and new technology over the past decade. These interventions have, in different ways, mobilized diverse bodies and embedded them into the discourses of contemporary art and digital media, positioning the body as a hybrid real/imaginary, physical/digital construct, enmeshed in embodying and integrating forces.
This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to gain insight into some of the most important contemporary practices and debates around the body, difference, and technology.
Director, Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London
Jordan Crandall has led the way for critically understanding technology in constructing representation, and in its critique, revealing not only aspects of our experiences but a fundamental shift in our sense of self. Crandall sees into the space of our perceptions. His writings constitute a glossary of words we thought we knew: words like perspective and pacing and publishing take on a depth of meaning, becoming keys to the multiple and crisscrossing, corporal and cyber, socially determined modes at work. It is within this new perceptual space that Crandall makes his art -- and that will change your perception forever.
Independent Curator, Chicago
The work of artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall is a major contribution to the understanding of media and communication technology and its impact on the human being and the visual arts. Drive will remain as a privileged document about artistic thought in the nineties, of a deep change in the concept of art, media and life. But the central issue of this book leads much further: Crandall offers a coherent theory about the individual, its redefinition through the media space and trough worldwide communication, as well as new issues of visual art and perception in contemporary spaces and their dynamic combinations of the real and the virtual.
Drive is about thinking the image and the status of the human being in the age of internet and of globalized mass media. Under these conditions, Jordan Crandall is pushing forward two main philosophical investigations of the seventies and eighties: Gilles Deleuze's concept of Rhizome,
the forerunner of networking, and Michel Foucault's analysis of the subject at the interface between technology and the body.
Independent critic, curator, and director of the post-graduate program at the Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes
Jordan Crandall's Drive is just the sort of intervention that our tech-besotted culture needs after the bubble bursts. Integrating image, text, and provocation, Drive provides a self-aware, yet never solipsistic synopsis of Crandall's art projects and a series of compact ruminations on the imbricated networks of culture, technology, and power.
Author, Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures.
Graduate Faculty, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design
Drive is a toolbox for thinking. It combines pristine analysis, holistic understanding, and operational effectiveness in a pulsating search for the possibilities of today. Drive refuses the limits of technicality and continuously aims to address the whole complexity of awareness. It sketches how to critically perceive - and thus enjoy and activate - the possibilities that arise from a globalising world. Staying close to experience, Drive becomes political in the broad sense; it challenges the reader to deal with the global as specifics.
Director, Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp
Jordan Crandall's works provide fugitive glimpses of some hidden parts of the world -- just under the radar of the everyday -- and it is a tantalizing a terrifying place. Evoking a world of universal surveillance and unapprehendable powers, Crandall draws us in with the heady pornographic allure of moving shadows in the dark -- both flesh and machine in rapid pulse. The meanings of their spasmodic motions being offered by the artist are given only through our prejudiced interpretations and whether we decide that what we see is entertainment or documentary expose'. Is this universe realistic or nihilistically brutal? How we answer says much about us as viewers and participants the modern world. Life under technocracies can no longer be refused or avoided, only techno-fetishized, disingenuously despised or -- as Crandall invites us to do -- looked at long and hard with a cool analytic gaze. But not so cool as to ruin the fun.
Curator, M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge
Drive is highly relevant to the shifting and turbulent terrain of global conflict, desire and surveillance. A deep dive into our bodies as language systems, territories and senses, Drive is luscious, threatening and totally riveting. Crandall throws down the gauntlet. He asks readers to accelerate through their current compulsions, whether for the containment of the database or for the uncontainable glimpse of yet another view.
Artistic Director, The Banff Centre for the Arts
In Jordan Crandall's book Drive, one enjoys encountering a convincing example of the changing role of an artist in the age of information and new technology. With insightful understanding of the new media, his artistic interventions, which encompass multimedia installation, performance, critical discourses, and organisation of online events, incarnate the very spirit of this mutating world: speed, mobility, information circulation and networking. Most crucially, as a multimedia activist, Crandall demonstrates the necessity of engaging artistic and intellectual activities in developing new strategies of resistance and critique. His art, employing electronic images, discourses, and space, reveals a distributed unconscious, undrawn maps of power, embodying vectors, couplings with machines -- and complex desires, which always enter into the scenes.
Independent art critic and curator, Paris
Jordan Crandall's Drive articulates that moment when the locus of our experience of the world shifted from the stable corporeality of the body to the interpenetrating fluidity of technological space. His provocative writings express the disorienting detachment triggered by the splintering of information, communication, and materiality into layers of mediated perception. Through the interlocking systems of military surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital manipulation, Crandall constructs a disturbing theoretical and poetic enquiry into the absorption of the body into the intimate infinity of electronic cyberspace.
Curator, Film and Video, Whitney Museum of American Art
Drive takes its passengers on a provocative tour of portable vehicles
for rhythmic and spatial interaction in electronic and digital space. A collection of documents and writings by Jordan Crandall about his pioneering projects in art installation and digital culture, from Blast to Drive, this bookish vehicle energetically investigates the public manifestations of electric intimacy and digital interiority. Crandall electrifies the reader with his artistic cartographies and theoretical relays between private desires, exterior movements, and public technologies of registration.
CoEditor of CTHEORY Multimedia
Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video at Cornell University
As cinema's "mechanical equipment" infiltrated perception, "deepening" it and speeding and slowing it up to reveal "a different nature" than is available to the naked eye, cinema introduced us, Benjamin wrote, "to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses." These optics bore a relation to the mode of production, of commodities and subjects; Gilles Deleuze ratcheted up this insight in casting cinema, like Marx's capital, as the deterritorialization of consciousness. In Drive, Jordan Crandall's reflections on the relation between "technological facing," sensorium and subjectivity update Benjamin's and Deleuze's insights as vision and desire are wired in imaging technologies produced for Hollywood and the military. Crandall's fusion of film and military-driven "strategic seeing" are not the stuff of science fiction but a deconstructive replication of the military-industrial-entertainment complex's invasion of our perceptual processes.
Acting Director, American Studies Program; Director, Center for Latin American & Carribean Studies, New York University
Today, Jordan Crandall's urgent voice demands to be heard. His work in media theory compels us to recognize the extent to which our consciousness is formed, manipulated and maintained by a range of technologies extending from those associated with image production to those constructing and managing ubiquitous networks.
Former Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Not content with constructing a typology of the post-industrial subject that paradoxically tends to surpass the very category of the subject, Jordan Crandall articulates his practice around the question of how such a lack of subjectivity could, nonetheless, resist -- or better, what resistance
would mean in a post-industrial context.
Chief Curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts and Co-Curator of Documenta 11
Overexpose the nerve endings of the hyperreal, oversaturate the images of data bodies, overwhelm the violence of techno-culture with an art of profound attunement to its times, and you will have finally stumbled upon the matrix art and writing of Jordan Crandall.
Editors, CTHEORY
Jordan Crandall has created a condensed series of clustered, poetic prophecies, offering up a new set of associations between the virtual and the real. Reacting to The Net by inquiring into its relationship to old technology, and life in general, he raises new debates, giving us fresh perspectives rather than reservations about its future.
Director, Hull Time Based Arts, UK
Drive drives us to face the new formats of that movement-connected hybrid machine called human,
in the age of information processing. Jordan Crandall critically captures the automatism of human-machine-image in the expanding database.
Media art curator and critic, Tokyo
This fine publication is the first survey on the complex dynamic practice of Jordan Crandall, who shows us ways beyond the fear of interdisciplinarity. Or in the words of Gyorgy Kepes: the fear that we might be forced to give up vested interests, which has kept us from pooling our knowledge.
Curator, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Crandall's texts are deliciously dense, filled with compelling information that strikes the reader as crucial and necessary to penetrate, absorb and benefit from at some unknown time when you least expect it. His works linger.
Founding Director, ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art, San Antonio