Fitting In to Computer Technology?
Interview with Jordan Crandall
by Brian Holmes

For documenta X, Jordan Crandall is presenting a multimedia installation called suspension, which combines various types of projections--video recordings of the space itself, synthetic renderings, live closed-circuit images of the visitors, washes of three-color light--to create a space which the distinctions between "real" and "virtual" fade away, as the visitor seeks to adapt to an environment which is constantly modified by his or her own activity. This modulating environment also materializes on home computer screens via the documenta website; certain of its parameters are expressed in the printed form of a book, while others have crystallized in the form of small, hand-held objects. This interview explores Crandall's views on the interface between technology and the intentional body.

Brian Holmes: The mix of computer processor, cathode ray tube, and cable-to-satellite transmission networks has given us sets of perceptual/representational equipment--what you call 'vehicles'--that reconfigure our relation to the world. Can you describe the emerging fit between the mass-produced vehicle and its operator? Who's driving who?

Jordan Crandall: The vehicle is embedded in, and constituted by, historically specific sets of communications technologies, code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a type of transport (which could be simply "imagination"). Its condition is that of movement; its function is to hold the body and mobilize it at the same time, reorienting it through a complex of interlocking mechanisms that participate in producing bodily faculties and awarenesses. It endeavors to produce an adequate occupant. It "couples" with a subject, locks onto it and "fits" it with molded parts and arrays of components, which define parameters of movement. But it is also produced through embodied practices although increasingly annexed to "market research") and its components bear the impressions of the use-patterns that inform them. The vehicle wants to hold you with an alluring finish and a cozy fit. It's where technology rises up to meet the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort, convenience. The vehicle is the interface to the market structures that will always take you there in a faster, cleaner, more comfortable way in a process that becomes nearly surgical. And the vehicle offers itself up as a sacrifice: its own materiality implodes, it scatters into arrays of parts, it inserts itself directly into the body, accompanied by media that help to produce desire for these "conveniences" in the name of self-improvement, progress, and adequacy. One rides simply to be counted; to matter; to be privy to the terms; to not be shut out like an abandoned hitchhiker.

BH Which is, of course, exactly the feeling that many people have. But let's try to understand, let's look inside. Your installation at documenta proposes various different "fits" between the visitor and the objects or devices in the space. It's a matter of getting one's bearings, of finding a rhythm between one's own movement and the projections on the walls.

JC This rhythm coordination is articulated in terms of "pacing." One paces back and forth within a space in order to in/habit a thought-formation. It's as if you move or walk through information, grounding and embodying it, through the agency of a physicalized beat. Pacing generates a beat that informs cognition. But it also undercuts it: at the same time that it physicalizes and locates, it also abstracts the boundaries and relationships between body and space in a kind of visual delirium. To be aware of pacings is to be aware of the cues, or vectors, that encode and initiate mobilization. When you pace back and forth, change a channel, respond to the dryer buzzer, pick up the phone or the sheet of paper from the printer, those are vector-movements. The installation space at documenta is crisscrossed with networks of these vectors. And here the other sense of pacing arises--the pacings of technological devices and systems, to which embodied rhythms are increasingly annexed, compelled to conform. Pacing marks a zone of liberty or a zone of commodification, though of course the distinctions aren't so easily made, and one doesn't have a choice so much as an option to pay attention.

BH If I follow you right, then those design objects on the shelves in the installation space are models of the technological interface that both shapes and is shaped by human behavior. Such objects are reified moments in the feedback loop between man and machine.

JC The pacings are channelled into, and registered by, these "rhythmic fittings." They are hand-held objects made for an absent, technologically mediated hand. They don't quite fit, but they try to produce a coupling--the hand tries to conform to the fitting and it tries to conform to the hand. It's like an everyday object that one fiddles with in a social situation (the stem of a glass, a lighter, a pen) in order to channel nervous energy, adjusting bodily rhythms to those of the social environment. In this way it is like a conduit. But it is also a conduit for technologically mediated adjustments--the electronic gadget that snuggles up into the hand and which registers other kinds of frequencies. These fittings are emerging object-agencies--social actors--that coordinate between bodily rhythms and environmental conditions, between movements and frequencies. They are bound up in the escalating drive toward cellularity, miniaturization, and speed. They are signal conduits between proliferating formats, immersed in struggles for format compatibility. They court transformations through encoded and embodied routines. The paces of these rhythmic fittings traverse and connect the sites of the documenta installation (which include the Kassel space, the website, and the accompanying book). They conduct oscillations between space (as inhabited) and figuration (as potentially inhabitable). The "real" and the "virtual" are arbitrary positions in which this dance becomes fixed; body and space are always mobilized between. To avoid these distinctions, the locus of the installation is called the "home setting," which operates as a mode or figure of presence. This home setting is local and distributed, suspended between formats and protocols, both miniaturized into devices and expanded into spaces. It is an articulatory dwelling place, behavioral and rhythmic, the site of the atunement of frequency, the synchronization of beat, the in/habitation of pattern. An occupant materializes itself within in accordance with its demands; its furnishings--vehicles--are those of adjustment, calibration, and transportation. It is a locus of subjectivizing procedures, a site of struggle.

BH Let's talk about that. You said that the social landscape is increasingly dominated by marketing strategies. Design objects become electronic stimulus-devices, calibrated to trigger certain behaviors. The mass-produced vehicles, like the routes they travel, are ways of channeling human relations. Where does art intervene? Do you think the public presentation of work like yours can help people choose their place amid this new technological conditioning of social space?

JC Ideally the work is an event that prompts an awareness of the positions that surround it, and the configurations that tie those positions together according to various needs. How are viewer and work constituted in an act of perceptual mediation, how are they mobilized, what ties them together, within what contexts, and to what end? What perceptual, temporal, and embodied capacities does this event mark and help to shape? What new agencies? The days of ivory-tower art analysis are over. Contemporary artwork has no currency if seen primarily in terms of traditional aesthetic concerns, and part of our work is to dislodge these notions from public conceptions and institutional programs, paying attention to the vast networks of forces and practices that operate below the surface. Aesthetic forms are bound up in visual technologies, and perception itself is technologically mediated. What is the sociotechnical field through which the artwork is viewed, and which helps determine the way it is viewed? What visual capacity is it helping to shape? What orientations, what paces, what signification forms? The stakes are high; we are engaged in a battle for the terms of communication and materialization (and communication is always materializing). The aesthetic field is a site of the conflict. The agenda for art would be to articulate these struggles for the terms of mattering.

BH That would be the agenda for a directly political art. But then you would have to articulate particular struggles, and twist the directional vectors toward specific aims. Otherwise I'm afraid the aesthetic field will simply be a proving ground for more successful techniques of manipulation. The recent evolution of popular music and cinema, for instance, is sobering. It seems to me that artists dealing with computer technology are invested with a great responsibility, that of preserving and expanding the margins of effective autonomy that the new communications media still offer. It can also be important to break the fit between ourselves and certain technologies.

JC The responsibility would be to look at new identity formations and agencies that span the distinctions relied upon by notions like autonomy. These articulatory sites are erupting everywhere, often in the most surprising places. Who and what are the new actors on the sociotechnical landscape? Potential alliances lurk there. And the fit always marks a pliable, tactical space.