Jordan Crandall and Lawrence Rinder:
Transcript of presentation at The Kitchen, New York
20 January 2001

LR: We're going to divide the program this evening into two parts. During the first segment, we're going to show a tape that is a compilation of all of the tracks from Jordan's serial work Drive. Jordan will tell you some of the technical facts and some of the themes that he was engaging. After a break for dinner, we'll view his newest work Heatseeking, which will be shown in its entirety in "BitStreams" at the Whitney Museum, opening on March 22.

JC: I’ll just begin with a brief overview on Drive. Drive is a project that I've worked on from 1998-2000. It's a seven-part series of videos (each part is referred to as a "track") that combines cinematic technology -- mostly 16mm film -- with military-derived tracking, targeting, and identifying systems. It combines formats of old and new, network and analogue, military and civilian, in order to move toward a post-cinematic language -- and one that has very particular historical and political resonances. All of the footage that you see in Drive is original footage, with the exception of some parts of Track 6, which contains military-commercial footage, some derived from smart bombs. I approach the making of these works much like a filmmaker.

[Tape begins.] Track 1 deals with movement -- with individual, isolated bodily movements and urban movements. It is structured according to coordinations -- coordinations between various kinds of rates, speeds, formats. It relays between the rhythms of the body and the rhythms of the city. It has many historical references, such as early experiments in sequential photography -- the idea of breaking down movement into its constituent parts in order to analyze those movements, very often as part of technologies of accounting. Thinking about, for example, Marey, who was a physiologist -- behind much of that sequential photography was measuring devices. Behind all of that photography is the fact of measurement of different rates of movement -- of looking at ways of harnessing that movement to production demands. This kind of research was funded in part by the military.

The green overlays that you see are the result of running the footage through a motion tracking system. I worked with the developer of this software to gear it for this purpose. It was originally developed for the military for use in tracking such things as missiles. I instead used it for this filmmaking purpose. It is very seamlessly integrated into the film -- it just sort of intertwines itself, often in very subtle ways. Sometimes you don't even notice that it's there. But it marks an enormous change in how the image is constituted. There is a mechanism of analysis behind it. It is sweeping through, in a sense, absorbing information. You can see the processing rhythms, in conjunction with the film rhythms. The information is sorted in a database, so there is a database structure behind it. The machine is registering movement, compiling information about movement. We will see in Track 2 how this database becomes a kind of speech, the speech of the machine.

LR: You mentioned in an article recently that one of the implications of this kind of tracking technology was to be predictive. How does that function here? Are we seeing that happening [in this sequence]?

JC: I'm glad you mentioned that because tracking is a type of seeing that is very much oriented toward predicting. In the case of military technology, it is wanting to see what is happening in order to predict what will happen -- what is moving, how it is moving, and how that movement can be controlled or intercepted. It is interesting to think about what tracking is because it is a process and also part of a new form of signification. It is a process of seeing, quantifying, and articulating. You could see it as part of a new semiotics. I'm interested in this in conjunction with film semiotics.

So tracking is scanning, absorbing information, trying to develop some kind of prediction, in order to intercept or control or modify the object. It is oriented toward the proactive. You see it as work in new policing strategies, which are very much oriented toward intercepting things before they occur -- in other words to predict a crime before it will happen. It often involves the redlining of areas or the locating of dangerous circumstances or dangerous individuals who, under certain circumstances, may be inclined toward criminal behavior. A politics of profiling is very important right now, and to see that developing is very encouraging.

I want to probe into these qualities of tracking and the peculiar warpage of time that results from it. It is evoking something that will happen, or could happen, or should happen, and almost carrying that future with it as part of its own body. That involves a kind of shrinkage or mutation. It is one important factor that "causes" material change.

LR: We're looking at Track 2 now, which is very close to Track 1, but here the database is made overt. You said it was an invented database -- are you symbolizing the idea of a database? Is there a relationship between those numbers and what is actually happening?

JC: There is a relationship, but it's not scientific. It is quantifying processing speeds, movement rates -- different temporal streams that run through the film. But it's done in a poetic way. It functions in terms of illustrating those streams, referring to a kind of statistical inclination -- a statisticalization that is about absorbing data and predicting a certain orientation. It's also about the different formats of identity that may arise. It's also about trying to bring out the idea of the database as an organizing principle. It does influence how this track is organized. What is really interesting to think about in all this is how the database operates as a new organizational paradigm for us. In the context of cinematic history, what interests me is how the database paradigm is displacing or augmenting the narrative paradigm. Lev Manovich has written extensively on this. The database is very much part of the way we see things. Its logics are everywhere. It has becoming a way in which the public is seen, heard, and made visible. It's where buying habits and all kinds of behaviors, down to the tiniest flickers of desire, are becoming measurable. It is a format through which we are "seen" almost as a calculus of manageable functions.

LR: Now we're viewing Track 3 --

JC: Those green images are made with a night vision camera made by ITT, the company that was the largest supplier of night vision technology to the US military since the Vietnam War. It allows you to film in complete darkness. It's interesting because night vision has now become a feature on consumer-grade video cameras. It's not as good as the military stuff of course, but it's an interesting example of the flow from military systems to consumer systems. The military way of seeing starts to filter into the way we're seeing. It's very much about an organization of a perceptual field, a particular kind of perspectivization.

LR: I wanted to ask you about the gesture that the actress is making [in Track 3] -- this repeated tapping of her breastbone as she is trying to get someone on the phone.

JC: She's tapping a number or sequence, tapping a rhythm on and of the body, caught in a kind of circuit, a loop, and very much oriented within a technological system. There is a particular interest I have in the fitting of the body inside technology, which I talk about in terms of a "vehicle." It's the fitting of the body within an apparatus of travel, of orientation, of mobilization, of … rhythmicization. Is that a word?

LR: Rhythmicity.

JC: Yes. Rhythmicity. The images I use are all technological metaphors, in order to speak about technology in ways that we are familiar with. The phone, car, a door knob -- simple things. When you see a telephone system or a car, you can see the fitting or orienting of the body, a holding of the body, in order to institute a linkup or a transport from one place to another. This holding of the body, this orienting of the body and its senses, has an attendant dimension of pleasure. A pleasure of fitting into, a pleasure of being held by. Of being controlled by. It's a particular kind of molding. And so at the same time that it is a very invasive and control-oriented contouring, it's also a very seductive one. From our point of view we can take a certain pleasure of the fit. In this particular track, the actress has very specific repetitive obsessions, as we see with the phone. There is a compulsion to encode, to internalize, a certain pattern. To in/habit it a particular way. I'm interested in that because it is a way of thinking about how technological systems, visual systems, are about the instillation of certain habits, routinizations, formats of behavior -- things in which we "fit in." Again, often in terms of a kind of vehicle, a vehicular device.

In this track, I evoke early Hollywood cinematic tropes, shooting with black and white 16mm film. I mix that with night vision videography, with satellite-derived imagery, and footage derived from wireless, hidden pinhole cameras that the actors wear on their bodies. In those scenes, the camera crew completely disappears. I also use this invented targeting system -- through computer animations -- which starts to become part of the way the actress sees. It becomes imposed on her vision. You see it here with the knob on the drawer and the door handle, where that kind of militarization seeps into how and what she sees, as well as behaves.

LR: You also speak about how particular angles, specifically the angle from above, evokes the military view, a kind of vertical gaze.

JC: Yes. We are at a point now when we have so many possibilities of filmic languages, because we have so many different visual systems. It is interesting to experiment with new orientations, orientations that can be politicized. There is the axis of the aerial view, which can be generally identified as a military axis, but not necessarily specifically so any more. But it is a filmic orientation that can be seen in contrast to the cinematic terrestrial orientation. I've done some writing on the development of these two orientations -- of how cinematic languages developed alongside military languages. It is interesting to see how the different orientations derived and how they sort of intercept each other. They intertwine. There is also the surveillance angle, a lateral angle coming down, which we recognize from surveillance camera monitors. There are angles that are about how a computer might see us. Not just as a webcam, although a webcam has its own particular angles as well, but in terms of how are seen by a technological system, through the ports of our own desktops. On the network, the image-system sees us back. There are also new angles derived from these little cameras, these little pinhole cameras, which transmit images wirelessly to a base station. They allow you to place them in many secret locations. You have the possibility of these very intimate and highly mobile views. These are all a part of emerging film languages.

LR: If you look at Drive and at Heatseeking, there are such an incredible variety of film styles it is seems to be a kind of encyclopedic rehearsal of various modes of both avant-garde and full-on Hollywood cinema moments. I wonder if you could talk about some of the specific references that you are drawing from. When I look at these, I see everything from Stan Brackhage to Carl Dreyer to Maya Deren, and so forth.

JC: Yes -- there's also live-action TV like "Cops," and MTV aesthetics, along with surrealist work like Cocteau. The little girl in Track 4 comes right out of "Blood of a Poet." There's quite a bit in Drive. But with Heatseeking, I'm actually not doing so much referencing. I think I've started to internalize it more.

LR: Something that is really important to these works, which is not immediately apparent from looking at them [on this single screen], are the disruptions of the standard cinematic form, as evidenced here at The Kitchen, with the two projections of Track 4 running on two screens opposite each other. Can you talk about other instances of this in the works that we have seen in Drive so far?

JC: When I first showed Track 1 of Drive at Sandra Gering Gallery in 1998, I experimented with video headsets. You wear them and the project the image out about 10-20 feet in front of you. The image hovers in front of you and moves with you. The image is semi-transparent so you can see through it. It's superimposed on the space in front of you. It was very interesting for me to think of Drive shown that way because, particularly Tracks 1 and 2, it is so much about relationships between physical and representational movements, and technological movements. It enabled me to draw an investigation of a space of representation that specifically involved viewer's movements. That was just after I had renounced ever using a computer mouse in an exhibition again. I found that work could be more "interactive" without it. This use of the video headset was the part of my ongoing interest in looking at mobile imaging systems.

When I first presented Heatseeking at inSITE in San Diego, I used a handheld device, a PDA. The videos were streamed to it wirelessly, using a software developed by Packet Video. During the time I was working on this project, I was talking with Qualcomm about developing a new kind of mobile device. I was interested in developing the shape of the device, thinking about how it would fit in the hand. I did not end up working with them on this (and our relationship to the corporate world is another discussion). It is interesting to think about how these new kinds of images are coming off from the mainframe and snuggling up to us, become personalized and moving with us, helping to change the way we see and behave, and how they are contoured against the body in form. It is interesting to see these devices as part of a way of augmenting vision, of augmenting perception and our sense of place, as well as the contours of the body. We know that this is happening a lot today with mobile communications -- you can see it with cell phones, for example, in the context of the history of the telephone and how that has changed our sense of space. How it has helped to generate new kinds of social worlds, new ways of seeing, of placing ourselves, of holding ourselves.

Working with the miniature, portable device is really a challenge. It is a different way of thinking about images and how we relate to them. It is a different dynamic of attention. You're multitasking, flipping between scales and formats. It's difficult to hold attention when you're engaged in so many different types of tasks. It is difficult to compete in this space. The logic is more that of advertising, of techniques fractured into small frames of time. As artists, can we compete with the world of advertising? Should we? We can choose not to compete at all. We can make a demand on the viewer. In any case, it is a time now when this large-scale cinematic projection format has, in a certain way, run its course, in a culture moving toward miniaturization, mobility, and dispersals of access.

LR: Can you address specifically your use of the dual projection screens in Track 4, as installed here at The Kitchen, and some of the themes of that piece?

JC: That piece was shot with an old hand-cranked camera, a surveillance camera, and a wireless pinhole camera worn on the actor's body. It is based on a famous case of Freud's called "A Child is Being Beaten," especially as used by Jean-Francois Lyotard in developing his concept of the "matrix." Rosalind Krauss has beautifully described this matrix figure as Lyotard saw it.

Track 4 of Drive is a way for me to think about this matrix figure. The matrix is a formalization of a repetition pattern. It is the cycling of a beat-system that underlies how we behave, how we hold ourselves, how we see. In extreme cases, it can form the basis of a psychic or psychosexual compulsion. For Lyotard, the matrix is a form that cements together an occurrence that holds a fascination for us -- a situation in which we become "caught," a situation into which we "fit" with a certain level of comfort. It is a network where roles are continually exchanged -- where, for example, observation flips into participation, seeing flips into being seen, beating turns into being beaten. Opposites are exchanged. With the rise of new visual systems, I wanted to think about that in relationship to the beat of changing visual modes, and the various ways in which one is drawn into or placed within them. The beat of the spank -- which is also very much a technological beat, mixed together with it -- marks the contact of hand against skin but also the flipping of roles and visual systems. There are pulses that start to become apparent, such as the pulse of the flickering light, which is caused by the hand that cranks the camera, the rhythm of the cranking hand within that (now antiquated) technical system. The use of the dual synchronized projections is to allow the precise flipping of roles and positions across the screens, and to draw the viewer into the space of the scene, with a certain level of discomfort perhaps.

As I develop further in Heatseeking, the actors start to become conscious of the visual systems -- they start to become conscious of the cameras. The actress in Track 4 looks up at the surveillance camera directly at several points, the actor looks at the film camera, the little girl has a certain awareness of being observed. There are all these degrees of self-consciousness. There are all these degrees of awareness of the devices and their orientations. And there are all these levels of comfort and displeasure. It is visible in the details such as the rhythm of the shift of the eyes. This is something that I am sure we will want to talk more about tonight. With the rise of these systems, which are often seen as very invasive, we see also new corresponding pleasures, new vectors of ... desire.

LR: That's a good place to break, because now we have the vector of ... hunger.

[break for dinner]

LR: We're going to be looking at some selections from Heatseeking, Jordan's newest work, which will be an integral part of the "BitStreams" exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which opens on March 22. This is a piece that I originally saw at inSITE in San Diego in a different format than how we're going to be presenting it at the Whitney, and we'll discuss that later. It was immediately captivating to me, and perhaps because of what Jordan was talking about before -- that he's coming into his own cinematic vocabulary. I'm really looking forward to others having a chance to see this work. Jordan, how do you see Heatseeking extending, or commenting upon, your earlier works, specifically Drive? What were some of the unanswered questions in Drive that you were trying to engage in this new piece?

JC: It's a good question. I think that, with this work, a lot of the conceptions and occupations of Drive are taken further into an interior space, a psychological space, a psychosexual space. I wanted to really probe deep. The questions that are really primary for me concern not technology per se, but how is affecting us, not only culturally but individually, psychically, sexually, and so on. With Heatseeking I wanted to probe more deeply into the realm of the imaginary, into a kind of virtually symbolic. A kind of virtual unconscious perhaps. I wanted to look into these shifting bounds between public and private space, body and technology, attraction and combat. This work was developed specifically in the context of InSITE, a joint cultural project of the US and Mexico, and results from thinking about the border region of San Diego/Tijuana. The San Diego/Tijuana border is the busiest border crossing in the world. The physical presence of this border is something that is difficult to get beyond. It's very imposing, deeply etched on the landscape. There is an enormous military presence there, with an arsenal of visual technology. It's a military presence that is about invasive seeing and fortification. I shot Heatseeking with some of this military technology, but I moved toward a thinking of the constitution of a border in a more symbolic and imaginary sense, linked to these new kinds of seeing machines, invading machines, protecting machines, which are also part of embodying forces, dividing processes, contouring processes. A protecting/invading/contouring dynamic. It has psychological, psychosexual as well as military dimensions. I am thinking about all of this metaphorically.

LR: This work is richly sensual, and sexual for that matter, as are parts of Drive. I wonder if you could talk a bit about your understanding of sexuality, particularly in relation to the overwhelming, and rather negative implications of the database/surveillance apparatus, and how you see sexuality functioning both within that and perhaps against it.

JC: A lot of which is talked about in critical debates -- and a lot of which I write about -- position this as the installment of a technics of control. It's a technics of control the likes of which we've never seen, and in fact much of which we can't see. It's very much an invisible apparatus, in many senses. And of course, very pervasive. Many theorists whose work I respect, and many involved with political issues -- which I am very much involved in, by the way, with this work and in my practice overall -- get themselves into a trap. It's fatalistic, a sense that things are over -- that we're seen, tracked, watched, invaded, controlled to such extent that there is no privacy left, it's basically finished, all is colonized, we have no agency left. You see theorists like Virilio, who is one of my favorites, boxing themselves in this way. These debates are very important, but to balance them we have to learn the lessons taught to us by people like De Certeau, who shows us that there thousands of ways that we escape the controlling gaze. There are all kinds of new practices at groundlevel, where we appropriate "controlled" space to our own ends. De Certeau talks about these very simple things that happen under our noses, that are continually generating new reversals, appropriations, new pockets of space.

If you look at people's use of webcams in their homes, for example, you think about what compels us to open up our private lives to the public view of strangers. In contrast to invasive seeing, you have to think, what are the pleasures of being seen? What are the pleasures of opening oneself up to unseen worlds? What kinds of new social and sexual patterns arise? In contrast to an invasive databasing, where we are quantified in certain instrumental ways, you have to think, what are the pleasures of being counted? What are the pleasures of registering on other representational surfaces? Being tracked and codified is also part of being someone who matters, someone who is paid attention to. It is a process of "coming into being." So a lot of my use of these erotic dimensions is to resist a one-way "invasive" argument, because there are all these new channels of pleasure or desire. We need to study what those are. In many ways they are testaments to human ingenuity.

There is another current leading into this, that relates to what we talked about earlier with Drive. It is the eroticization of the vehicle, the eroticization of the fit -- the fitting of the body within a technological system. There is also the use of seductive imagery as a tool, a technique, through which to smuggle in ideas. In that sense it's about seducing the viewer, compelling them to pay attention.

LR: There is a statement that you made in an interview with Brian Holmes that I think summarizes some of what you've been saying. You said, "from my own position it involves wanting to discover a role in this data/surveillance apparatus, and to reinforce a sense of physicality lost within a network of dispersal. It is to see what could be a disembodying system, instead as an embodying, or incorporating one." I think that is captured very well in the work, and particularly in its sensual and sexual dimension, which really figuratively embodies issues, as you were saying, seducing people to pay attention through the means of the body, the seduction of the body.

You've been talking in general terms about these works, in terms of theoretical and social constructs, but I can't help but wonder to what degree these works are personally expressive. After all, one notices that this work, which is nominally an exploration of the conditions of the San Diego/Tijuana border, which is a massively populated and ethnically diverse region, is in these images almost completely disinhabited, and ethnically homogeneous. Can you talk about your own personal expressive voice in relation to some of these more general themes that you've been discussing?

JC: That's the most difficult thing for me to talk about. But I'll give it a try. In response to the first part of what you said, a lot of people think of technology in very disembodied terms. But technology points in the direction of embodiment. It's very physical. It's very physicalizing. So it's not something that just leads outward into some kind of disembodied situation -- a detached thing -- but something that helps to mutate or contour the physical. That is something that I very much want to emphasize, with all of my work. There are cybernetic circuits that connect us to these things.

In part of my thinking in how I relate to the work, I think of my being a kind of investigator, prober, trying to delve into a more symbolic realm, trying to ferret out certain instances, stories, vignettes, which somehow have some larger resonance. They are moved into an imaginary situation. There is a surreality about them.

LR: I think I follow you, and my personal take on your work is that there is very little of your own fantasy life going on in these works. I think you are very adept at manipulating symbolic regimes and conventions of sexuality, let's say, precisely to seduce people into of metaphors of consciousness or connections to other aspects of our lives in this technological moment. You wrote an essay in 1997 which I think is really wonderful called "Mobilization," in which you are talking about metaphors of consciousness, and specifically about cinema, and you talked about something that cinema did called "performative corporealization." I wonder if you could explain, first of all, performative corporealization -- you defined it as the viewer's internalization of the conditions of representational apparatus of film -- and talk about how we've moved from that metaphor, the cinematic metaphor, to that of the database.

JC: Performative corporealization is looking at how the body, through circuits and cycles of repetition, sediments itself, places itself, performs itself. It's related to a lot of performative theory, people like Judith Butler. Embodiment is always an in/habiting process, we are always being shaped and shaping ourselves through these circuits. This involves various kinds of coordinations, and various sensitizations to different kinds of movements. In relationship to cinema, I think of Serge Daney, who was a brilliant French critic, who wrote on how cinema was about a kind of locking into place of a viewer, a fixing of a location of viewership, immobilizing a viewer, in order to sensitize this viewer to new mobilities. Often you can think this relationship in terms of dances between mobility and immobility -- coordinations or exchanges between different rates of mobility. At one time we thought we were becoming digital couch potatoes, we were thinking that we would become immobilized at the computer monitor. In a lot of cyberpunk fiction like that of William Gibson, the body became "meat" -- parked at the monitor, a lump of flesh. There was a sense that we were leaving the physical self and moving out into this virtual realm. But in fact, you can see that as a stage, in a longer-term process of immobilizing a viewer in order to instill a new sense of mobility, accustomizing the viewer to new worlds of movement. So it's interesting to think the history of cinema as part of an apparatus of locationing and sensitization, instilling in a newly immobilized public new formats of movement. Computerization also has that dimension. If you start to think about these larger dynamics, you can start to think of these new visual systems as involved in staging that process. What are the mechanisms behind that, what are the interests behind that, and how can we use that awareness to develop a politics of seeing?

There is a kind of mutation of images that occur in this landscape, and that is that images become part of processing systems, parts of apparatus that "see back" at us. It involves a kind of reversal of vision, displacing our location as privileged sites in the viewing exchange. We are seen, before we see. We are identified, before we identify. There are biometric systems, and other kinds of systems, which lock onto you, identify you through your behavior patterns or biological characteristics. It is a kind of switching of positions, and this is a very important change to think about.

LR: With that, I think we'll open up the discussion to the audience.

Audience: In response to what you are saying and your mention of Paul Virilio, I'm thinking of his concept of "polar inertia," and his discussion of how the world, and our perception of things becoming real, involves a highly mediated perception.

JC: I was really disappointed in Virilio's concept of polar inertia. Because he positions it as a one-way concept. We're at the center of a world of movement where we are required to stay in place while worlds of images are streamed through us. Worlds of motion, virtual worlds, stream through us while we sit fixated. But it is a faulty concept because, thinking about mobile communications for example, with new arrays of modes of access, and a launching of the body back into circulation, we have to think of dances and exchanges between mobility and immobility -- of certain kinds of coordinations, coordination mechanisms among rates of movement. Around that we're talking about mediatized reality and our relationship to the real.

Audience: You are using a lot of military technology, and I was wondering how available it is. How do you inform yourself about it?

JC: Research. A lot of this equipment is available. With the Infrared thermal imaging camera, for example, we couldn't get the camera from the US Border Patrol, but it was easy to get it on loan from the manufacturer. It was a less expensive version, of course. I got permission to spend time with the US Border Patrol to see how they use the camera, and then I got the actual camera from another source.

There is a lot of flow between the military and commercial realms. The night vision equipment from ITT, the company that also supplies the military, is commercially available. Once you start researching a lot this stuff you find that commercial versions of it are surprisingly available. Well, at least to an American who is not targeted for suspicion, of course. There is a lot of information out there on what the military is doing. The Department of Defense has a good website, they even have a mailinglist called "Combat Camera," which is one of my favorites. They even have their own little Academy Awards for the best military videographers and military productions. Check out the US Space Command website (SPACECOM). You think that a lot of this would be hidden. It's surprisingly available. If this much information is available, it really makes you wonder what is hidden.

It's an interesting realm to think about where we're going, because it all filters into culture. The Army talks about the soldier of the 21st century, for example -- the ways in which the body is fortified and made more productive on the battlefield. It connects very strongly to the cyborg imaginary. The Army talks about how, through new communications or telepresence systems, the soldier's actual presence on the battlefield may not be required. There is talk about the outfitting of the eyes with scrims, which overlay databased schematics on the field of vision. Companies like Boeing, for example, are already using such systems to increase worker's productivity. They can call up schematics on the part of the airplane they're working on, and overlay these diagrams over the work area. All of this talk of making the soldier more productive, enhancing its capabilities to fight, is the same as that of enhancing the worker. To produce better, to be more in touch, to be more efficient. So it relates very much to the general concern of increasing performance efficiency through biological augmentation, of altering and enhancing the body, making it better able to see, move, perform, execute. With that, of course, come changing cultural concepts of fitness. There are so many flows back and forth between civilian and military, work machine and war machine, you sometimes have to wonder where the divisions are. My work is a deep meditation of this.

Audience: You said that we are known before we know - things know us before we know them. That there are cameras watching us everywhere...

JC: Yes, there are cameras watching you now. (laughter) There are biometric systems now, which scan your physical characteristics in order to identify you. It might be a retinal scanner, it might be a face recognition program that has your facial characteristics stored in a database. We are always willingly surrendering information about ourselves and our behaviors, mostly for the purposes of commerce, and generally to save time, to make things more convenient, more reliable, or safer. When you go to a website and it knows what you shop for, and gears certain advertisements specifically to you, it targets in this way based on your past behavior. Your behavior is very trackable, and you don't even know you are divulging it. Sensar Inc was testing these retinal scanners -- I don't know if they are currently yet in use -- where you go to the ATM and it can identify you with nearly 100% accuracy. No two people have the same retinal pattern. We willingly surrender our retinal pattern, we allow it to be uploaded into the database, because it's safer, no one could steal your ATM card and pose as you, and it's more time-saving and convenient, you don't have to punch in a PIN number. This kind of retinal match is more reliable than card or code, no one can tamper with it. With biometrics no one else can pose as us, no one else has the same retinal pattern, fingerprint, facial pattern.

So very often we surrender these kinds of things under the auspices of convenience, safety, portability, reliability. It opens the doors of access. With GPS systems and new location-based services, it makes a new kind of visibility. It makes us newly visible, it makes a new kind of access to us. It is a whole apparatus of our being seen, that is largely invisible to us, and it becomes so powerful that it may be the thing that sees us first. It may be the thing that sets the terms.

We're still stuck with the illusion that we see first -- that we are the primary seers. We're saddled with the old visual conventions that make this apparatus continually invisible to us. We need to create a more political awareness of this. We need to see the image less in terms of its being offered up to us and more of a ruse, a cover for a port through which we are imaged.

LR: I think there is a comment in one of your essays -- I am not sure if it was you or if you were quoting someone else -- that says that images are obsolete, they are too slow. That the speed of the database is the level of cognition that we need to aspire to, to keep up with our oppressors, or what have you, which is a daunting task. I'm curious about this because it seems to me that your own work is becoming slower, moving towards the image rather than away from it. Five years ago, your work was radically distributed on the net, strictly speaking, it was net work, you were engaged with these forums, these conversations on the net, that was your artistic practice. Now you're making beautiful movies. How do you explain this?

JC: The online forums are more a part of my critical practice, which began with a publication called Blast in 1991. Blast was centered around discursive activity, and around 1994, most of this started to occur on the net. Around 1996 I started to develop my own personal practice. Blast still continued, and I've been engaged in both kinds of activity. The online forums of Blast are specifically about dealing with these and other critical issues, and my own personal work goes off into a different kind of space. It revolves around the image, and yes, often very slowly and seductively. I need the image, in order to understand its obsolescence, its masquerades.

[further discussion ensued, but was not caught on tape]

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transcribed by Mark Ashbery

Lawrence Rinder is Curator of Contemorary Art at the Whitney Museum.