Interview for Adrift, Rotterdam

Marinus de Ruiter

MdR: Your works each provoke different emotions. In 1997 I saw Suspension at Documenta X, which gave me a sense of involvement. Last year I saw Drive and this week Heatseeking, which were more disturbing, alienating. Do you think that in your work you have developed a more negative attitude towards technology in this world?

JC: Last week I read an article that said that our view of the stars in the sky is slowly diminishing. Because of the secondary light that is cast upwards into the sky from urban development, we are seeing less and less of the nighttime sky with our own eyes. You could lament this fact and think about all the ways in which technological development degrades our natural enviroment. You would be right. But you would also be right to think about all the ways in which it enhances our environment. Because the article went on to say that, with the technology of satellites and ever more powerful telescopes, we are seeing more and more of the universe than ever before. Think of the amazing images that the Hubble has given us! So on one hand we are seeing less, but on the other hand we are seeing more. There is always a negative and a positive to technology. There is a violence, and an enhancement. You have to look at both. And somewhere in between, we (as humans) oscillate, and our sensorium changes. We incorporate these new ways of seeing less and of seeing more. In my work I want to reflect this.

Are you always reflecting the present state of technology in your work or are you also trying to predict/envisage technology of the future? If so, can you illustrate this with a track/fragment out of Heatseeking?

I’m concerned with both the present and the future. And I’m concerned with both by way of the past. For example, I use film and reference certain filmic conventions, even proto-cinematic conventions (Marey), in order to understand how the changing nature of movement and movement representation are mediated by technologies, and how these technologies have historically operated as agents of control. I often emphasize their militarized dimensions in order to foreground these issues of power. For me, the present and future state of technology is the story of how we are changing -- in form, behavior, visual orientation -- and how those changes are instituted in practice. That is my real topic. It’s not technology per se, but the changes that it helps to contour. In Heatseeking, my work has moved further into a psychological, interpersonal, and sexual realm, for example in the “Course” track, where the story is not about the surveillance and military technology per se, but how its dynamics are incorporated in the body’s sensorium. A simple golf game turns into an act of war, and the combat apparatus, which always courses through the body, is engaged in a kind of fantasy space, fueled by pleasure and paranoia.

I just read in a Time article about the Mexican border that "the feds have erected stadium lights and video cameras at three-mile intervals down the line, enabling spotters to see anyone who crosses". The scenery for “Course” seems to be based on this situation. Which facts and myths about the US-Mexican border do you refer to in Heatseeking?

There are a lot of technologies that the US Border Patrol uses to police the US/Mexico border. For Heatseeking, I used some of these technologies, including an Infrared thermal imaging camera that allows you to see human heat patterns in complete darkness. I use the technology to reference the militaristic presence at the border, but not in a way to condemn border patrollers or their methods. I take it into the realm of a symbolic policing, where borders are continually fought for, established, and crossed at the personal and interpersonal level. The act of seeing or detecting is fraught with combative decisions, and we are always negotiating where and what we defend in our lives. Even sitting in front of the television, watching the news, we draw the battlelines. We establish an “in here” versus an “out there.” Curiously, what we defend against has an erotic dimension. I don’t want to deal with surveillance issues without acknowledging that dimension, and trying to come to terms with it. All of this complicates the tidy ethical arguments we might make about the border. The seven tracks of Heatseeking – in addition to “Course,” there are “Colonia,” “Beach,” “Ship,” “Villa,” “Freeway,” and “Hospital” – take place in symbolic settings in the San Diego/Tijuana area, but none of them actually represent, or deal specifically with, the US/Mexico border. They traffic in a different kind of realm. Actually, the stadium lights that you mentioned do appear in the “Colonia” track, and help to place the actress on the Mexican side of the border, but she is bathed in three lights – the stadium light, the moonlight, and the light from the television set – which traverse her body and transmit her into a different kind of locale. Right from the start, she is mediated, suspended across continually shifting border zones.

The people in Heatseeking seem mysterious. They're quiet and their actions are mysterious; you can only feel that they must know what they are doing. You have said "we have to learn the lessons taught to us by people like (Michel) De Certeau, who shows us that there are thousands of ways that we escape the controlling gaze". Is that what the people in the films are doing?

They are escaping, as they are becoming complicitous. They internalize the gaze and its conditions. They are being integrated with it, and incorporating themselves in relation to it. Their actions, eye movements, relations, as well as the camera and editing languages are all the results of the internalization of apparatuses of control -- but in eros, there is always a pathway out. This is one of the reasons that the category of the erotic is so important to me. In the “Beach” track, after the sequence with the coupling machine, the actress crawls along the shore as she is tracked by the thermal imaging camera. Where is she going? Is she trying to escape detection? To deceive? Or to be seen? Who does she target; who targets her? There is avoidance of invasive technology, yet there is also the twisting of its use in an erotics of display. I want you to always question who or what is doing the seeing, and the mechanisms behind the shifting gaze, however it is instantiated.

My next question comes from rereading a now old text by Nam June Paik called 'Art and Sattelite' (1984). Speaking of Paik and his art, your work seems to rely on similar insights and excitement about the possibilities of further development in communication, combined with the visual and the sensual. Your work on the other hand is less ecstatic, more introvert; less celebrating, more restrained. Do you however see the connection? If not, which artists do you feel related to?

I’m not familiar with the text, or Paik’s work in general, but it is good to know there is some connection. Mostly I feel related to writers rather than artists: people like Donna Haraway, Margaret Morse, Katherine Hayles, Manuel de Landa, Rosalind Krauss, Paul Virilio, Mark Seltzer, Chantal Mouffe, Jonathan Crary, Saskia Sassen, Lev Manovich, and of course Freud, Deleuze, and Foucault, whose legacy is strong in my work. I feel related to many cultural practitioners who are grappling with critical issues pertaining to net culture, who write online, even though I don’t know their visual work so well or have met them face to face. I feel related to many architects – Keller Easterling (with whom I edited my book for Documenta X), Greg Lynn and Diller + Scofidio among them – and filmmakers like Harun Farocki, who is perhaps the filmmaker that I most respect. Even though I don’t reference many artists overtly, many people make connections between my work and the work of other artists in the present and past, and I appreciate that because I learn from it.

You've talked about the topic of change. In this stage in time we as humans are changing in form, behavior and visual orientation. As I understand it, you say text plays an important role in that change, even though you think it is getting outdated in its present form? And what influence does the use of images nowadays have on that change?

Well many people think that we have moved from a text-based paradigm to an image-based one. Of course you can see an image as just another kind of text. While a lot of textual theory has certainly run its course, much of it is still relevant. What I’m interested in is not so much image culture per se, or visual culture, which too often privileges the visual. I’m interested in the role of the database as a new organizational paradigm, and I’m interested in the codes of movement. Movement constitutes a text in and of itself. I’m interested in critical dance studies for this reason, if we open up the field of dance to include all forms of structured movement. When you combine database systems with movement codes, we are talking about a very different kind of text – and one with many historical precedents. I’m interested in the virtual machines that drive the representation of movement. One of my ongoing occupations is the theorization of a body/machine/movement cluster – a cluster that is continually materializing itself as it is dematerialized, integrated into other networks.

There is much work to be done to articulate the database paradigm. We are only just beginning. I think theorists like Lev Manovich, Bruno Latour, and Katherine Hayles have a lot to offer in this area.

First, in 1996 you started making work to be displayed in visual art exhibitions. Do you feel satisfied at this point with that practice? What gives the art space its special appeal to you?

That’s a tough question. I think it’s because it is the only place, really, that I fit in. I mean, I’m not a filmmaker, though I show my work at some film and video festivals, I’m not a professor, I’m not an activist… There are many realms that I circulate in, to some extent, but to which I don’t really belong. In spite of the many problems of the art world, I feel fairly welcome there, and I value the rich history of art, particularly in the modern era. It is a very productive context for all kinds of investigations into the nature of representation, perception, embodiment, and so on, and the role of technological developments in facilitating these changes.

Your next project Trigger is a film loop, if I understand it correctly. Could you describe in what form it will be presented? Do you have other future plans in making art?

Trigger will be an installation with two synchronized projections on opposite walls. It uses film as well as military technology, but it all ends up on a DVD. One of the technologies I will use is an eye-tracked synchronization system, which automatically aligns weapon and human gaze. What is depicted is an elaborate hunt between two domestic soldiers that is also a seduction. I want to create a condition of hypervigilance, both for the actors on screen and the visitors in the space. I want you to feel the systems of combat coursing through the body. “Trigger” symbolizes that place place where body and machine meet in a physical or psychological switch of some kind, ready for an act

of engagement. With this project I want to traffic between eye, camera, and weapon in an erotic physiology of combat. I want to combine line of fire with line of desire. In the case of the eye-tracked synchronization system, 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? This project will be shown in the fall of 2002. I’ve got two other projects on the drawing board, but I’ve got my hands full with this one.