Interview with Jordan Crandall for Sandbox Magazine
07/27/01
Brooke A. Knight
Jordan Crandall is an artist and media theorist whose work concerns
surveillance, agency, and filmic language. Presented as installations
with several tracks looping concurrently, both Drive and Heatseeking (his
two most recent works) hurl the viewer from one point of view to another.
Using 16mm film, DV, nightvision cameras, and other military-derived
technology, Crandall conflates multiple modes of watching: we see images
as if we were an audience member in a theater, a pilot on a bombing run, a
border patrol looking for illegal aliens, or a video game player. His
work asks us to consider the agencies behind these modes of viewing, and
how we are being changed by them.
He has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Whitney
Museum's BitStreams exhibition this past Spring. Other venues include
Documenta X in Kassel, Net_Condition at ZKM in Karlshrue, and InSITE 2000
in San Diego and Tijuana. He also lectures extensively on technology and
culture and writes for a variety of media, including Artforum, Atlantica,
TRANS.arts.cultures.media, and CTHEORY. An anthology of Crandall's
critical writing on technology and culture, with an introduction by Peter
Weibel, will be published in 2001 by Cantz Verlag and ZKM. Crandall is
also founding Editor of Blast (http://www.blast.org) and director of the X
Art Foundation, New York.
Here, he converses through email with Brooke A. Knight, an artist and
writer who recently published "Watch Me! Webcams and the Public Exposure
of Private Lives" in the winter 2000 issue of Art Journal. Knight's
artwork includes Desktop, a live, streaming video of his computer's
desktop at his workplace. The conversation took place from July 25-27,
2001.
Brooke
Knight: Your work clearly interrogates a militarized way of
looking,
through your use of nightvision, footage from "smart bombs," and
aerial
perspectives. The text part of your
piece Drive convincingly
argues
that this way of looking constitutes a new filmic language.
Do you
think
that the widespread use of surveillance cameras has generated
another
new visual language? Is it the same
as a militarized way of
looking?
Jordan Crandall: There are similarities. What is the difference between
how the military looks, how the police look, and how a civilian looks? The
militarized way of looking is about a kind of shielding/invading dynamic
that is also a part of everyday life. It is at work when we think of
differences between "us" and "them," danger and safety, or when we stand
the line against a particular issue. Sitting at the television with a
remote control, deciding what you are going to accept into your worldview
through the media channel of the television, is in a sense drawing the
battlelines. The remote control, camera, or any handheld device is an
interface to a battlefield, whether in an economic, political, or
psychological sense. What are we doing when we use the nightvision
feature on the video camera to secretly observe someone in the dark? How
do we watch, through what systems do we watch, and why? I want to think
of the particular agendas to which the technologies and modes of looking
are attached, rather than just the technologies themselves, and to think
about the new visual conventions that arise. Surveillance aesthetics have
seeped into popular culture, and they certainly do constitute a new visual
language. But the choices have to be carefully made, especially if you
want to dig deeper. Especially into the psychological, sexual, or
interpersonal dynamics, because the surveillance apparatus is internalized
in perception and behavior. So the aesthetics have to encode what is
happening as the apparatus is moving into the body, or adapting that body
to a regulatory system. If surveillance is becoming part of how we see --
and it certainly is -- then what does that say about the changes to our
sensoria, our modes of being, our communications styles, and so on, and
our willingness to be made adequate to new imperatives?
BK:
Certainly, new technologies are developed because of imperatives,
usually
stemming from either economic or military needs -- the need to
stay
"ahead," either on the battlefield or in the boardroom. And our
bodies
adapt frighteningly quickly to whatever sensorial "enhancements"
are
available. Eyeglasses let us read, nightvision gives our
cars the
ability
to see deer in front of us, as recently advertised by Cadillac.
What's
really interesting is the relative rapidity with which military
developments
become part of the civilian society. Do
you see a danger in
this,
or is the relationship more complex?
JC: It's complex, because there is a flow back and forth and also a
difficulty in situating the military/civilian, or military/business,
divide. For many, US industrial policy has always been masquerading as
military spending. Also the military logic is so much a part of our
culture and things like Reagan/Bush's space-based lasers could never have
come about if they weren't already civilianized somehow. The civilian
realm is the great normalizer for the military developments. I've been
following the development of the missile defense program and to what
extent that has become a political tool across the board. It's a figure
for a techno-political process of shaping the world to suit the US agenda,
and it is tied not only to the defense contractors who stand to make a lot
of money but also to the American imaginary conditioned by Star Wars,
video games, and a news media committed to the production of new enemies.
The missile shield is the first step toward the weaponization of space,
which is what the US has its sights on. But you hardly see Americans up
in arms about it. So the danger is not necessarily the flow from military
to civilian, but in the uncontested use of the civilian realm as a
breeding ground for the justification of military agendas, built on the
production of new dangers and new formats of protection. A technology
like nightvision is interesting because it was once developed for the
Vietnam War and it is now in Cadillacs. But no one is going to use it to
mow down enemies on the sidewalk at night. What is interesting is how the
technology encodes the justification of a particular way of seeing under
the guise of safety, and what material effects that might have.
of
"it takes a village...” in that by either watching others -- or being
watched
by others -- we somehow develop a sense of community.
"Community"
always
implies exclusion, setting up an us/them dialectic.
And with
exclusion,
there are always borders. As your
work, especially
Heatseeking,
deals with borders, could you discuss how you see the
relationship
between borders, community, and surveillance technology?
JC: A territory is a contested body of any sort, in any degree of
physicality or immateriality. It has many dimensions -- psychological,
social, corporeal, genealogical. It can be backed by various kinds of
invasive machinery, determined by the technological capacities of a time.
A border marks a place where territorial occupation has, on a surface
level, seemed to cease. But it never really ceases. It may seem to cease
because it has migrated to another front. Territorial contestations are
fought at groundlevel and many other levels, including in the realm of
images. Imaging apparatus -- surveillance or otherwise -- help to stage
new occupations. The trigger click is replaced with the camera click. As
Ariella Azoulay says, the camera marks a place of war. It marks the
coming of a border, a border that will convey a cessation on the surface
-- a place where the occupation will have seemed to stop. It could at
these times even seem to stage a "rescue." Community formations are
always going to arise within and across borders, never wholly contained or
resolved. It's a good thing. They show how an "us" is materialized and
give faith in the future.
BK:
If the community is never resolved, there has to be an ever changing
"us". Perhaps one of the most dangerous aspects of
imaging technology is
the
appearance of a fixed place, body, or context.
Even in military
tracking
systems that move with the target, there are still borders to the
picture,
elements that are left out. The target
-- military or commercial
--
is rendered understandable by a willingness to remove "extraneous"
information,
and concentrate on gathering information that fits within a
certain
data set or image frame. Your work
includes at least an allusion
to
databases -- do databases constitute an invasive machinery?
A new type
of
territorial image?
JC: Good points. There is always something left out, and especially with
tracking systems, there is always a database attached. Tracking systems
scan for patterns that match certain sets of criteria, and they are often
networked and connected to extensive databases. A face recognition system
for example can scan a crowd, digitize each face into an eigenface and
compare it against a database of suspects, all in real time. What is
really interesting is the role of the database as a new organizing
principle. Lev Manovich has written extensively on this. I used a
database system as an organizing logic in Track 2 of Drive and also, to a
lesser extent, in Track 7. (Drive has seven tracks, which is just a way
of saying seven different parts.) What is interesting for me is how the
database logic affects the organization of the visual and perceptual
field, as well as our thoughts and actions. Increasingly, the image acts
as a kind of ruse for the database, which is becoming more primary. To
decode an image, especially a militarized image, is to see the navigation,
communication, or coordination network in which the image is situated, and
the agendas it is tied to: those of positioning, tracking, identifying,
predicting, targeting, intercepting, containing, etc. In the field of
movement tracking, I'm interested in how the representation of movement
has changed from early proto-cinematic studies such as those of Marey, to
the movement tracking of today, and what kind of change that heralds.
Track 1 of Drive evokes how movement is broken down into its component
parts and made available to a host of new measuring devices. All my work
is, in a way, about the machines that drive the representation of
movement. The database raises a lot of political issues. You see it with
the focus on preventivity -- intercepting crime before it occurs -- in
such forms as racial profiling. Remember the controversies with the New
Jersey police force over that. The database is part of an apparatus of
absorbing data that sees us before we see it. Largely, it is invisible.
We don't think about the tracking systems on the Web, for example, but the
Web is an elaborate system of sucking up data in order to more precisely
tailor an image. (This has largely been for a fixed viewer. Now we have
a moving one with the advent of location-based services, which tie
together GPS system, mobile device, and network in order to specifically
target a moving individual. How is movement constituted here?) So the
surface of the database, and its partner, the image, is the result of our
having already been seen. We are depicted, before we can depict. Our
position at the privileged end of the viewing exchange has been displaced.
It is an enormous crisis. There is a radically different basis for
representation emerging.
BK:
Have viewers really ever been privileged? Perhaps it is only the
appearance
of privilege: while readers “construct” the text as they read,
there
are always controlling contextual factors.
It could be said that
the
alphabet prefigures all narratives, just as all images are already in
the
camera. The database contains the potential for all
data. It is we
who
imagine ourselves as that data -- we have been taught to do so.
What
happens
when the intervention is the realization that we do not exist as
data,
that we are not contained within the preset limitations of digital
information? It may be like walking past the video cameras
at Sears, and
recognizing
that you are not the image you see on the TV monitors.
JC: That's really where the politics happens. It's in the recognition of
the gaps, the misalignments, when things don't quite match up. These are
the moments to fight for. Military and industry need to align databases
with moving targets in a way that counts, accounts for, and produces
subjects. I wrote about this a few years ago, following Jacques Ranciere
-- how "counting" equals "accounting for." The spaces for artistic
intervention are in the slippages -- when database, image, body, and
subject don't quite align in a way that can be captured. Mark Seltzer
writes brilliantly about the relays back and forth between information
systems and psychic states. Structures of information about the state of
things rebound back to help shape the state of things. How we are
represented influences what we become. We privately internalize the
public definition of our "type of person." I'm interested in the relays
between private desires, external movement, and databased networks of
registration. Who are we other than our buying habits, our movement
traces, our statistical tendencies, our "ID" actualities? It's
interesting to see the move toward biometric systems, where someone's
identity can be verified by unique anatomical or biological
characteristics -- fingerprint, face pattern, gestures, retinal pattern.
When it comes down to it, the scrim of information doesn't always catch
the body in the way that making a direct link to its substrate does.
BK:
Maybe the fingerprint or retinal pattern is where our "actual" selves
--
whatever that means -- touches our data- or image- selves. What happens
when
we aim the cameras back at ourselves? When we use the technology for
self-definition? What about webcams?
JC: Webcams are endlessly fascinating. They show that what some people
consider invasive -- turning cameras on the interior, private space of
oneself at home -- others consider in more positive intimate terms. For
many, the thought of having a webcam aimed at themselves while sleeping is
extremely disturbing; for some it is like having some benevolent presence
in the room. There is an emerging lexicon of webcam usage that it very
intimately tied to the personal space of individuals and their
identifications. If you go into a lesbian forum like you might find on
ICUII, you find the codes of representation very different than what you
might be used to. To court one another, many lesbian women do not show
themselves or their bodies directly, but will point the webcam to another
spot in the room, and then move it slowly to subtly and gradually reveal
aspects of the room. Trust is determined by how you move your webcam in
response. There is a delicate dance. Slowly, an outline of hair may come
into the picture, which the camera may trace slightly, only to move away
again. This kind of flirtation is a completely new phenomenon, highly
poetic and intimate in the subtlest ways. You know the refresh rate with
a webcam can be very slow, so consequently movement can be very staggered.
If you make a fast movement, it won't even be registered. So to show
movement, you have to move slowly, within the conditions of the capacity
of the system. You internalize the conditions of the technical structure
in the rate of movement of the body. It's like Charlie Chaplin in his
famous walking style. It was a walking style that came about by
internalizing the conditions of film technology at that time. That said,
there is the issue that you brought up, of using the technology for
self-definition. That is the most exciting thing, to watch how the
conditions of the apparatus are internalized and a space made for
invention. The more invasive technology can be seen to become, the more
opportunity it can also offer for reinvention. There is the term "le
perruque" that the French used to use, maybe they still do, that refers to
the worker who gives the appearance of being productive but who instead is
opening up new spaces of invention, twisting production time to suit his
or her own ends. There are always new practices at groundlevel that
resist control. Think of the legacy of De Certeau. Many critics speak of
invasive technology as if it's all over, there is no space left for
privacy. Through my work, I want to always keep the door open. There is
always something going on, right under our noses, that is testament to
human ingenuity, and the possibility of self-redefinition. There is
always eros.
BK:
Your mention of that complex and intriguing webcam dance brings up the
possibility
not only of poetics, but also play, and subsequently,
invention
through play. We should not at all
be surprised at the desire
for
play (Huizinga's Homo Ludens), yet there is a special delight when it
is
developed through a "misuse" of a military/industrial apparatus. In
Heatseeking,
you employ tracking technology in the freeway sequences in a
most
unexpected way. Could you discuss
the use of play in your work?
JC: The freeway track of Heatseeking is interesting to bring up in
relation to what we were saying earlier about the nightvision-outfitted
Cadillac. Here the actress is seeing through an Infrared thermal-imaging
camera, of the kind that is used by the US Border Patrol, and she appears
at times to be trying to shoot down other cars. (Not that the Border
Patrol is trying to shoot down people trying to cross the border -- that
is not the case at all.) But she's also playing a video game, and we are
suspended between the real and virtual roads. The focus of the beginning
of that piece is on the routings between eye, viewfinder, and trigger, or
in this case more specifically, eye, camera-windshield, and
stickshift-gun. It is where body and machine meet in some kind of trigger
device -- an activation-center between perception, technology, and the
pacings of the body. The vehicle has always been a perfect metaphor for
me, of how attention is orchestrated and the body is held in position
against a landscape of mobility, and in this case it is a kind of armed
encasement, which registers both combativeness and sensuality. There is
the pleasure of the fit of the body against the machine within this very
intimate space, and the visual networks, transport routes, ranges of body
movements, and borders between interior and exterior (or here and there)
help to define the contours of the self within a bubble of presence.
There is the normalization within an armed encasement, and an
eroticization of fit and function, with the body being integrated into
other systems that complicate its status. For me the use of play is a
kind of experimentation and invention within these very specific
conditions. I use it in terms of the erotic, the compulsive, the
intimate, the drive to extend the social realm or open up the public-ness
of privatized space. It is a kind of openness to the complexity of
viewing networks, orientations, and agencies in which the materiality of
the body flickers, like static patterns within a defined TV set.
BK:
The issue of public and private space is especially relevant in the
prison-industrial
complex as well. It is not a difficult
leap to see your
work
in light of Bentham's Panopticon (or Foucault's readings thereof),
especially
where the body meets the machine. To
me, you provide us with a
kind
of reverse-panopticon, where we can see one subject matter at many
angles,
with many devices (nightvision, film, video, aerial imaging,
etc.),
and through many constructs (military, filmic, surveillance, video
games,
etc.). The subject matter (woman in the car, couple
on the beach,
men
fighting at a golf course) is the central column, and we are able to
see
it from all of the cells (camera angles, imaging technologies).
JC: I like that reading. It takes it so much further. I like to think
there is a reciprocity between the filmic language and the subject matter.
The conditions of observation not only internalized in subjects, but in
the very formats and language used to depict those subjects. With an
unresolved dimension of desire, which complicates a one-way reading of
"control." Just as there are always new ways to imprison, there are
always new routes of escape. As long as we are not deluding ourselves
with the routes of escape that are compellingly offered within the
strategies of imprisonment. Larry Rinder once asked me what some of the
viewpoints represented in Heatseeking, because they seemed impossible
viewpoints. For example, surveillance cameras that would have to be
floating in the air at the seashore. It's interesting because we are used
to all kinds of tracking shots and flying camera positions in film, and we
don't wonder at the agency behind the camera placement. We are still
thinking about who is doing the seeing behind a surveillance camera. We
still wonder at the agency behind a new recording or observing device.
Just as we wonder, I try to invest my characters too with varying degrees
of awareness of the observing devices. They are self-conscious, and yet
they take pleasure too. How many factors are in play, how many details --
gestures, breathing patterns -- that speak worlds, when new technologies
and observing modes are en route to being internalized. It's all on its
way into the body. I'm not really interested in virtualization. I'm
interested in materialization.
BK:
On your website, you post a treatment for
your
next project, Trigger. Based on our conversation, this seems like a
very
logical step. If everything is going
into the body, and you are
concerned
with agency, then the trigger is the focal point, where the body
is
extended by the machine, and the machine is activated by the body.
Through
your use of installation, it seems that you are interested in the
viewer
recognizing her own agency, as her viewpoint shifts from being a
member
of the audience, to identifying with the subject on screen, to
becoming
the voyeur looking through the surveillance camera. The fact that
she
walks through the piece makes her complicit with what is seen on the
screens.
Is this what you intend with the form of the work? Will Trigger
be
an installation as well?
JC: Yes. It will be an installation with two synchronized projections on
opposite walls. All of what you mention are important challenges for me.
I want to create a condition of hypervigilance, both for the actors on
screen and the visitors in the space. What is depicted is an elaborate
hunt that is also a seduction. I want you to feel the systems of combat
coursing through the body. Trigger is only a working title. I'm looking
for a term that metaphorically describes that place where body and machine
meet in a physical or psychological switch of some kind, ready for an act
of engagement. It should be a term that allows me to traffic between eye,
camera, and weapon in an erotic physiology of combat. To combine line of
fire with line of desire. One of the technologies I will use is an
eye-tracked synchronization system, which automatically aligns weapon and
human gaze. In this case, seeing really does become firing. Is the
camera-weapon manned or unmanned? Where is the body that connects to the
viewfinder? When the trigger of a camera is pressed, what kind of
occupation does it stage? Aim the sights, shoot, capture, encode. Frozen
in an image, or replaced by one.