Locked On
Jordan Crandall’s Heatseeking
by David Womack


Before going to see Jordan Crandall’s Heatseeking as part of the
“BitStreams” show at the Whitney, I took my lunch to Central Park. It was
late winter and only a few black leaves still hung from the branches. Above
my bench perched a tiny surveillance camera. The green cable clung like a
vine to the tree trunk. Why would someone want to watch me as I ate my
sandwich, and who? I imagined mayor Rudy Giuliani bent before a monitor,
saying, “Do you see that? Ham. It’s definitely ham.” I was both nervous and
excited to be the subject of attention.

According to Tony Geraghty (in “Tapping into the Future,” Index on
Censorship, March/–April 2000), British and American intelligence agencies
have set up a satellite network whose sole purpose is to monitor e-mails
sent to and from anywhere in the world. The Index on Censorship reports that
on a single day the average Londoner is filmed by more than 300 cameras.
These cameras are increasingly linked to a network of databases containing
such details as financial status, personal opinion and spending profiles.
Though we may tip our hats to avoid the camera, we are skewered by our cell
phones or credit cards, whose records can be obtained by police without a
warrant or even notification. A level of surveillance once reserved for
military targets is now being trained on ordinary civilians across the
globe. As surveillance technology grows less obtrusive and more ubiquitous,
the awareness of being studied is slipping imperceptibly into our daily
consciousness. “We know, increasingly, that this atmospheric surround sees
us, but we don’t know how or what its images of us look like,” artist Jordan
Crandall explains (in Parachute, Oct.–-Dec. 2000).

Eye of the Beholder

When I first enter the Whitney exhibition “BitStreams,” which features
forty-nine artists who use digital technologies, I see few signs that new
technology is anything more than a harmless tool for creating amusing
diversions. John Klima has built what seems to be a large video game based
on the idea of flying with birds. A San Francisco-based group called DISC
has put a CD in a microwave and then drawn on it with markers. I study a
print-out of a series of giant Ns drawn with a computer mouse by artist Jeff
Elrod. Suddenly, explosions rock the gallery I am standing in. The woman
next to me cringes and clutches her purse.

I follow the sounds down a short hallway to a darkened theatre. As I enter,
a frightened child bumps against my thigh. On a large-format movie screen
are thermal images showing a white stain of human heat as someone crawls
through a green night. Night-vision cameras have picked up trace particles
of light and reconstructed them as a pixilated landscape. Figures slowly
emerge from the darkness. Jordan Crandall’s Heatseeking (1999-–2000) weaves
together footage from a variety of media, including digital video from both
a surveillance camera and an infrared thermal-imaging camera. Everyday
objects reveal hidden dimensions as one sees the world through the eyes of
these technologies. The images are haunting – both foreign and familiar. A
simple sunrise takes on apocalyptic dimensions. A streetlight glows like a
red star. The explosions are replaced by the tatting sound of a dot matrix
printer.

A View from the Network

Crandall’s experiments of the early and mid 1990s focused on text-based,
virtual-reality sites called MOOs (Multi-user domain, Object Oriented). MOOs
allow people to connect to the same site at the same time, and to interact
with each other as well as manipulate cyber-objects. Crandall speaks of “the
pleasure of movement, of masquerade, of newfound desires mediated by this
strange telecommunicational space. In MOOs you continually enact the world
around you, help bring it into being. If you do not speak, you are like a
ghost, no one knows you are there.”

As the internet gained popularity, however, it quickly became clear that
people did know he was there. Crandall’s experiments were taking place in a
highly accessible public space. He became increasingly aware of the
corporate and political forces that were beginning to flood the Web. “It was
a kind of growing up,” he tells me, “a transfer from a sort of naive play to
a state where we were aware of all the forces at work and had to develop a
more critical and politically oriented practice. Otherwise, we risked
becoming new product designers or doing R&D for the corporate world.”

Over the past decade Crandall has come to use digital technology less as a
tool for making art and more as a subject to explore through his art. In
Heatseeking and a previous work, Drive (1998), he looks at the implications
of networked technologies by examining the images they employ. Rather than
having the audience log on to a site he selects images produced by digital
technologies and splices them together to make a film.

The technologies Crandall draws on have their origins in early proto-filmic
techniques. In World War One, cameras were suspended from balloons that
drifted over battlefields. Their lenses pointing downward, the cameras were
set to take pictures at precise intervals for the purpose of detecting enemy
troops and positions. When laid side by side and compared, such pictures
could also be used to track and analyze movement, and thus to predict the
future position of targets. These primitive technologies have evolved into
the current networked surveillance systems that Crandall employs. Today’s
systems join images with a powerful database that is capable of recognizing
complex patterns.

Image and Intent

In Heatseeking, we see a barren plain dotted with clumps of sage grass cut
by narrow dirt roads and the muddy Rio Grande. This is the setting for the
largest buildup of surveillance technology in the world. In order to
understand the forces behind the development and use of sophisticated
surveillance systems, Crandall traveled to the US/Mexico border in
California. He received special permission to go out on night patrols with
US border-patrol agents. He learned how to site along the horizon and detect
a human heat-trace. Night after night he watched, as some of the military’s
most sensitive equipment was trained on exhausted immigrants, their clothes
still wet from the crossing. Most of the images in Heatseeking were shot in
the San Diego/Tijuana area using surveillance techniques and technology. The
border is very important in Crandall’s work. It serves as a metaphor for the
complex and increasingly intimate relationship between humans and
surveillance technology. Like its physical analogue, the border between
humans and this technology seems from a distance to be an absolute division.
On closer examination, however, we see that it is a place of
interpenetration and flux. The border locates an active, highly charged
exchange. Rather than taking sides – either condemning networked technology
as an enemy of the individual or becoming dazzled by its factory sheen –
Crandall focuses on the implications of this growing integration. This focus
yields a complex and interesting portrait of a relationship that threatens
the agency of the individual while opening realms of knowledge and
pleasure.

Tracking the Future

In a sequence from Drive we see a delicate web of green lines surrounding a
moving figure. The lines are produced by motion-tracking software that
detects, identifies and analyzes movement. The software searches for
patterns and calculates trajectories. The network thus moves beyond simple
monitoring to the assessment of probabilities.

Although networked technology has existed for decades, it is only in the
last few years that surveillance systems have moved beyond the passive
recording of data to become active agents in shaping our visual environment.
Every time you log on to a Web site, the system recognizes you as a unique
user and accesses your profile. For profiling purposes, the advantage of the
Web over, say, a credit-card receipt is that its observations are not
limited to end results. The system watches the way you shop, what you look
at and how you move through the site, adding information to your profile
whether or not you make a purchase. Your profile is a highly valuable
commodity that is now traded and sold by corporations. The profile and its
implications are influencing the fields of computer science, psychology and
law.

The true value of the profile lies not in what it tells us about who you are
but in what it tells us about who you will be. If we know your desires and
activities before you act, we can intercept or cater to them. On e-commerce
sites, algorithms drive a collaborative filtering engine that matches your
purchasing patterns to those of others. On a site like Amazon.com an
intelligent agent may look for people that bought the same ten books you did
in the same order. The agent then searches this set of profiles for the
eleventh book and recommends it to you. The more information contained in
your profile and the profiles of others, the more accurate these
recommendations can be. You may not even know your agent is working for you.

As David Pescowitz writes in Scientific American (June 2000), “In some sense
your agent may know you even better than you do.” As we begin to trust the
system we open ourselves to manipulation. Your agent may steer you towards a
more expensive purchase. Your agent may decide you are a credit risk. Your
agent may know that you are 27.4% more likely to commit a crime than the
person sitting at the computer next to you.

Angels are Watching

Some condemn these surveillance technologies as violations of privacy.
Others, however, choose to seek out the gaze of the system. This is shown
most strikingly through the phenomenon of the Web Cam, which turns
surveillance on its head. Individuals seek the system’s gaze by installing
cameras that broadcast their every action to the Web. “I don’t mind people
watching,” writes Ana Voog on anacam.com. “In fact, I find it rather
comforting, especially when I’m sleeping S I feel like you are all angels
watching over me.”

In Heatseeking a woman lies naked on an operating table. The camera zooms in
as a metal probe dimples her flesh, then cuts to a grainy black-and-white
sequence shot from above. A dark line slowly scans the length of her body. A
machine graphs the results. The camera cuts back and forth between the
familiar horizontal anthropocentric perspective shot and the vertically
oriented machine perspective. I feel simultaneously voyeuristic (watching as
the figure on screen is revealed) and protective (doubting the underlying
motives of the apparatus). The woman on screen seems to be experiencing a
similar mixture of erotic charge and extreme anxiety. As the relationship
between humans and machines expands, these may become the defining emotions
of our age.

Jordan Crandall’s work reveals hidden dimensions of this new physical and
emotional landscape. Digital technologies extend our vision into strange new
territories, vastly expanding our areas of influence. However, technology
has a momentum of its own, one that drives new innovations as much as it is
driven by them. We are left overwhelmed and excited, locked in a
relationship we are no longer able to control. The system becomes a shadowy
but palpable presence. The system watches from the trees, reads our mail,
tells us we are beautiful while it sells us accessories. We don’t trust it
completely and yet we are drawn to it.