Interview with Jordan Crandall on the ”Trigger Project” by Rosanne Altstatt

From the publication Jordan Crandall: Trigger Project, published by Revolver – Archiv für Aktuelle Kunst on the occasion of Crandall’s exhibition at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany, April 6 - June 9, 2002.

Rosanne Altstatt: Even though you are most well known for your film and video work, I’d like to start this interview with a question about your diagrams. Their dynamics are so different from the slick impressions your moving images make. The pencil drawings are more intimate, like an inward spinning force. What is the relationship between the two?

Jordan Crandall: My work begins with these diagrams. They are the key to everything. They map the processes that give rise to the structure, content, pacing. And many of them are in a very personal zone, close to the body – they are dealing with the space between eye, viewfinder, and trigger. I’m probing deeper into a psychological realm, and so I’m very glad that the diagrams evoke that intimacy, even as they are also connected to larger militarized systems. And they also really show the work of the hand, which is just as present as anything technology-mediated.

RA: During the first week of our exhibition you held a workshop which acted as a production phase of your new work ”Trigger”. What did you hope to accomplish in the workshop?

JC: In order to precisely orchestrate this dual projection installation, you have to conduct many tests. The scale of the Edith Russ Site for Media Art is perfect for testing the dynamic between the actors on screen, the projection scale, and the audience viewing patterns. We are in the process of improvising the actual film set and shooting various test scenes. Then, immediately, we can project these tests on the walls and see how they work. From these tests, the final storyboards will be developed. So three things are going on: a mock film set allows us to generate test footage; the test footage is projected on the wall in order to see how it works when installed; and a final storyboard coalesces as the exhibition plays out.

RA: ”Trigger” will be projected onto opposite walls. Why did you choose this form?

JC: I want to integrate the viewing audience in the drama between two characters as they hunt each other. You will have to physically turn your body to face one screen or the other. So you can never really encapsulate the entirety of the production from a comfortable external position. You can't master it as you can if you are focused on a single screen. It moves quickly and you're always going to have a different experience, because your body has to be as hypervigilant as the actors on screen. You have to be quick, attuned, agile like a good soldier.

RA: Are you really making a parallel with soldier-skills and viewer-skills?

JC: To the extent that they are sharing a condition of hypervigilance, when all of the senses are heightened.

RA: The story has to do with two soldiers watching each other through their sights. This seems like a familiar theme from many Hollywood war movies. Did certain films come to mind while conceiving ”Trigger”?

JC: Yes, there are lots of Hollywood precedents, countless war films that I've seen. My references are small moments, usually structural and involving some kind of subtle camera intrusion. You wouldn't know it unless you were looking for it. There is a scene in Kubrick's ”Full Metal Jacket” for example where the film camera pans up as the soldier's rifle raises up, and it tries to align itself through the soldier's gun sight. You have the camera, the audience eye, the soldier's gun sight, and the soldier's eye all trying to align in order to ‘get the shot’ – the shot that ‘takes’ the picture but also the life of its human target. Through the alignment of eye, machine, and viewfinder some kind of artillery issues forth, connected through the conduit of the hand on the trigger-shutter, where human beats and machine beats synchronize. I'm looking for a camera that is never innocent, the sights that are always subject to control technologies and conventions, and the constitution of the shooting-victim.

RA: I'm not so sure everyone in the camera's viewfinder would consider him or herself a victim – but what would the constitution of a shooting-victim be?

JC: I don't necessarily mean that to be the case. But there is always a power dynamic. The shooting-victim is a casualty of the image-seeking apparatus and/or gun. I’m trying to make a term that evokes the violence also perpetrated by the camera and all that it stands for.

RA: After going to acting school, you began making films and videos yourself. What made you switch sides?

JC: I enjoy experiencing both sides of the camera. And now there are not only two sides, but many. I want to try out all of them.

RA: You must be referring to the use of various camera technologies and perspectives – something of a post-cinematic language, which I’ve read about in your previous interviews.

JC: Yes. With the use of surveillance and tracking systems, and with military-derived images such as those from night vision cameras or those streamed from camera-mounted smart bombs, we have all kinds of new visual formats in play. I'm interested in the ways that these new systems become internalized, and how they become part of new visual languages that challenge cinematic conventions as well as the power dynamics inherent in this. I'm also interested in the difference between terrestrial and aerial languages and the whole lexicon of analyzing and reassembling terrestrial motion from the air.

RA: What is your visual vocabulary for ”Trigger”?

JC: There is a play between cinematic (terrestrial) surveillance and satellite views. I also use an eye-tracked synchronization system, which automatically aligns weapon and fighter gaze, even if they are not connected. This questions conventions of cinematic continuity and cohesion while it also raises contemporary issues of networked embodiment. There are specific targeting formats I use which operate as new forms of perspective-construction – certainly in a more military sense but as generalized control technologies nonetheless. Overall I am orchestrating a fracturing and linkage of viewpoints across human and machinic systems, and linked to very specific camera orientations that are politicized. The speed and efficiency of the networked flows, sorted through the logics of the database, constitute an artillery-like force. There is the question, now more than ever, of what a camera constitutes and who is the agency connected to it, and how to visually represent a complex and often very non-visual system.

RA: Tell me what you mean by agency in this case. Are you talking about who is steering the camera or the purpose behind the use of the camera?

JC: Both. The form and observing capacity of the seer, along with its intention and its ability to act. We don’t ask these questions with the use of a film camera because the cinematic technology is so normalized. That is one of the reasons it is so interesting to use militarized technology. It is not yet internalized so one has to immediately ask about the agency behind the camera. What is the difference between how a policing system watches and how we watch? How the military sees and how the media sees? It also brings these questions to bear on how we see through the very normalized technologies of mass media, in a way of instituting our own personal kinds of policing. We say, ”‘I’ stand here against ‘them’,” and we fortify a border. We justify an attack, personal or otherwise, against an opponent against which we stand. There are all kinds of combat situations in everyday life, all kinds of border-shaping processes that suggest who we are and what kind of person we are becoming. Bunker-building begins at home. In the setting of ”Trigger” there are structures that evoke hybrid home-bunkers in various states of construction, in order to suggest metaphorically this processes of fortifying barriers on the domestic front.

RA: You are talking about the three structures we will have as the film set in the exhibition hall: a bunker, a wooden wall with a window, and a cement block house. But you also refer to combat situations in everyday life and personal policing. What kinds of personal bunkers do you think we are building as a result of increasing surveillance of everyday life?

JC: Surveillance can help generate a kind of safety bubble – a realm where we feel we are being protected against crime. It’s fortified by ideologies and practices. It’s also part of a process of subjectivization, a bubble of interiority that helps to determine the contours of the self. It is also linked to the formation of group identities. There is a mobile and protean architecture to it. We have all our little vehicles that we travel around in like cars, in a culture that oscillates between atomization into fractured units and grand unifications, visible in concepts like the national missile shield.

RA: As you've stated in previous interviews, ”Drive” (1998 – 2000) and ”Heatseeking” (1999 – 2000) are very much about movement, flow and the rhythms of the body. Though these two series did have a violent edge to them, ”Trigger” promises to be much more about vision as a weapon. Yet many decades of increasing camera surveillance has led to people being more comfortable with the idea of being constantly watched. Don't you think the tension has lessened?

JC: Yes. Which is why I am interested in two things here. The first is the erotic, because there are the pleasures of being observed, which we are only beginning to discover and which are very difficult to square with certain political agendas, such as those dealing with privacy issues. Being observed, surrendering one's private life to the gaze of an other, can have a distinct erotic edge, especially for a younger generation. The second is politics, because we have to confront the agencies behind the lessening of this tension. Whenever surveillance is justified in the name of safety or protection, it is we who have to go on high alert. This cuddly, friendly surveillance – justified in the name of convenience, safety, efficiency, reliability, and stylishly glossed with a modern décor – is a dangerous thing when its politics are vanquished. For the most part, we're not talking about surveillance cameras anymore, but tracking networks connected to vast database systems, which are increasingly invisible as they are pervasive.

RA: There is a definite erotic edge to ”Trigger”, yet you cut some of the scenes with a sexual character that were planned.

JC: All of those scenes will still be there. What I cut were the explanations, because it is so difficult to articulate this erotic dimension in text form. I've decided to let the erotic play out in visual and structural terms without feeling the need to write about it. I don't want to theorize about it – I want it to be something that undoes theory, something that traffics under the surface and questions all of the tidy conclusions that we make. In a sense, the erotic is the great other. We've got to pay attention to what it tells us, but what it tells us is not subject to our laws of order. The question is how to maintain that tension and develop a politics from it – a politics that would seem to contain its very antithesis.

RA: A politics of the erotic? You've lost me here.

JC: Well, I don't really know what it means either. It doesn't add up, but I guess that's the point. It is a politics that would undo itself. I'm trying somehow, through visual and diagrammatic work, to ventriloquize it. It's like Lyotard's matrix figure – a ‘form’ that figures recurrences, but which in the end is not really a form but a kind of anti-form. In a basic sense, though, you could say that if there is an eros of power, there is a politics of that eros.

RA: The erotic is not just the great other, it's the variable in the systemized machine. When I start thinking of the erotic's role in a possible electronic human system, I come up with all sorts of romantic notions of ‘love’ breaking the rules and short-circuiting the network.

JC: Well said! Short-circuiting, but also rewiring, in a way that may not be entirely functional.

RA: In ”Trigger”’s storybook, you write of the soldier as an integrated weapons platform. Armies have tried to make soldiers more efficient by enhancing their capabilities – more recently with electronic weaponry – since the beginning of time. Yet since September 11, high-tech seems more like a weakness than a strength. After all, the terrorist attacks on your state of residence, New York, was low-tech but high-concept. It turned out to be extremely efficient. Does this have any bearing on your views of the integrated weapons platform?

JC: In all aspects of the military, efforts have been underway to more closely tie human, armament, and combat network. In the Army's ‘Land Warrior’ program, for example, which is still in development, the soldiers are outfitted with headgear that allows them to see in any weather condition, day or night, and with a 360 degree panorama. They are connected to communications networks, and a head-mounted display allows realtime information to overlay their field of vision. The goal is to become a more efficient, lethal, networked, fighting machine. There is something of the ‘Borg’ here, with the soldier becoming part of a hive mind. There is even a military concept of ‘swarming’: small, agile, highly mobile bands of soldiers armed with arrays of communications gear and networked weaponry, and heavily connected to airborne support. In Afghanistan, soldiers aimed handheld lasers at targets while laser-guided missiles were launched at these targets from planes. Soldiers on the ground, satellite systems, planes, and precision weaponry constituted a seamless flow, orchestrated through various command centers. This is the soldier as integrated weapons platform. I don't think September 11 has changed this concept, or the US's undying faith in high technology. What it has changed is the ways in which we justify increased military presence, and increased police presence in general – towards something that would be more like an integrated policing platform. The fears of the public are inflamed as the powers of military, the FBI and CIA, and various other kinds of policing and monitoring agencies, increase to meet a need. I don't think that the US would admit that high technology is a weakness in any way. It just means the technology isn't good enough yet.

RA: What about ‘human intelligence’ a.k.a. spies – like in the WW II movies where they meet on dark nights while crossing bridges, infiltrate each other's lairs, go deep under cover? It seems that there is more than enough data, but not enough human resources to process and analyze this data.

JC: Yes, but the human is there to feed into the technology. It's part of the technology. The human intelligence is linked to the machine. It's mediated by machinic systems. The human becomes a necessary component – it is never discounted. But it is of value in its having been made adequate for integration with the intelligence and communications systems (and vice versa). Technology sets the terms, it modifies the capacities of the human. But in the end, technology is just human ingenuity, the extension of the human. Humans, machines, and combat systems are indelibly linked and we don't necessary know where one component ends and the other begins. You're absolutely right about there not being enough human resources to process and analyze the data. But what is our answer is to that? Building more and better machines.

RA: What would be the base of an ‘integrated policing platform’. Instead of the single agent, all electroniced up, we would have ...

JC: ... formerly isolated database systems linked up in shared networks. Common interfaces to share data across various intelligence and policing agencies in as close to realtime as possible, with suspicions eased between governmental agencies that have been historically walled off from each other. New alliances between police, military, and industry. New cooperations to share intelligence information between countries.

RA: Are you suggesting the privatization of the military? Is this science fiction or are there some real efforts taking place beyond the tradition of the militia?

JC: The ties between military and industry are so strong already, and there is a strong symbiotic energy that you wouldn’t have if they we fully absorbed into one another. The military is business by other means. There always have to be other measures available. We’re backed by an apparatus of war and work. In business, we have a tool; in war, we have a weapon.

RA: Remaining on the subject of an integrated police, military, and industry: where would this leave privacy laws? Do you think they will become obsolete? There are all sorts of buzzwords I can throw in here: new world order, globalization, war against terror ...

JC: There have been so many privacy debates online, and attempts have been made to politicize this very urgent subject – at the same time that some have tried to articulate the private/public divide in different terms, such as to replace a unified concept of privacy with a heterogeneous one like ‘zones of intimacy’. But at least in the US, the debate hasn’t caught fire, people don’t see it as much of an issue anymore. People have been willing to surrender privacy if it means more convenience, if it saves them time, and if it offers more protection – especially now, post-September 11. The concern for safety trumps any concern over threats to privacy. In a sense, it has finished off this already much-beleaguered subject. It urgently needs to be politicized, especially in light of the lack of opposition to the increasing of governmental powers that could threaten civil liberties. But the terms of the debate need to be reworked. The term ”privacy” needs to be unpacked: it’s fraught from within.

RA: Should we redefine privacy?

JC: It is a matter of deciding what is absolutely crucial to protect and against what it should be protected. It changes through time and cultures, it’s not really a stable concept.

RA: Let's play out a worst case scenario: In twenty years from now absolutely everything is networked; no loopholes. What then? Do you have any predictions on human behavior? In your work, the different camera perspectives charge the atmosphere. Do you think this would have the same effect on everyday life?

JC: New forms of detection are always countered with new forms of deception. There is always a dance between the two. I believe that total surveillance is an impossible concept. There are always going to be things that slip under the radar. In the war on Kosovo we had expensive precision-guided missiles fired at cheap decoy tanks. The Serbian military also strategically switched off their radar in order to obfuscate their ground locations to the aerial electronics of NATO forces. You can even see how this detection-deception dance refigures materiality: look at the form of the stealth fighter, which was built as a series of flat planes in order to evade radar detection. We want to increase our ability to see while evading detection by others, and our opponents want the same. So rather than a vector of one-way progress in detection technologies, we have a matrix. Progress occurs in matrices of detection and evasion among combative actors who are each trying to gain the edge. So I’m interested in evoking the increased powers of surveillance, but rather than think only of how we’re becoming totally surveilled, I’m interested in the ingenious ways that we develop to jam the signal. To appropriate it, to reshape it in a way that is often soft and undulating, not hard-edged. Much has been written about voyeurism, about the erotics of seeing, but I am very much interested in an erotics of display – of being seen by sensed presences – and how that connects to modes of deception and the dispersal of the fields of action. The playing field is often not where we expect it, or structured in terms of the codes that we know. In spite of the exponential increase in the powers of surveillance technology, we still have to ultimately know where to look – this is the space that is constantly being rewritten by the players.

RA: Let’s get back to classic, narrative, storybook cinema. Everybody plays by the rules, but love breaks it up. Yet your works have no actual ‘story’, do they?

JC: Not really, although they do have some narrative pull and you can read all kinds of narratives into them. But I hope to frustrate that, just as I hope to frustrate binaries of construction/anarchy or attraction/repulsion. My works have the structure of systems, they’re structured along the lines of various circuitry diagrams and I think they have a more matrix-like structure, almost like a database. But I have to admit that I think of ”Trigger”, at least on some level, as a kind of love story. It is a courtship between the two actors, at least in a database reality.