Drive
Jordan Crandall
Sandra Gering Gallery, NYC

review by Ken Goldberg

As our ocularcentric culture goes digital, we are delegating even the act of watching to our labor saving devices. Jordan Crandall gives us a glimpse into both past and future in this exhibit of high-tech Readymades.

Visitors entering the darkened gallery are confronted with a large video projection of a man performing repetitive motions reminscent of Muybridge and Taylor. Periodically, tiny points and frames appear at the edges of the body with the lime green signature of the robotic eye familiar to viewers of science fiction and CNN's Gulf war reports.

These points and frames have a history. Largely funded by the military, university research on computer vision has produced an extensive science base, including Laplacian and stochastic edge detectors, eigenvalue-based pattern analysis, and Gabor filters for analyzing optical flow. Journals and conferences regularly report advances that are applied to images from satellites, surveillance cameras, and robots. After 30 years of research, computer vision technology is beginning to emerge from the laboratory into new products.

Crandall is available most days in the gallery to calmly answer questions. He explains how the points and frames indicate patterns detected by the motion tracking software from SVS, Inc. He directs visitors to put on a prototype portable digital video player and Glasstron headset from Sony, a Walkman for your eyes. On another shelf is a fitting for a human foot, an indexical trace created in a commercial stereolithography lab.

On the last shelf is a retinal scanner from EyeDentify, Inc. Crandall invites visitors to peer into the eyepiece, where human eye meets an iconic orange eye. The machine records 192 features in the pattern of blood vessels in the retina, then flashes to indicate that these are safely stored in its database. Subsequent eye contact will rapidly yield the identity of the human: retinas are extremely hard to fake.

All of the high-tech biometric devices and software in the show are in the prototype stage; they are not quite available in stores. Although we have read about them in WiReD and ArtByte, we haven't had immediate experience with them. Crandall got them by doing his own research, finding laboratories, writing letters, and building trust with corporate insiders. By placing these high-tech Readymades into an art gallery, Crandall makes a subtle comment on high tech commodification. Just as Duchamp's bicycle wheel demonstrated an innovation in bearing design, these objects are just beyond our reach: their description in the press makes us long for them all the more. Placing them into the gallery underscores our fetishization of new technologies and hints at the complex relationship between ownership and digital art.

And yes, the devices are for sale. The listed gallery prices include some overhead, so you may want to use the Internet to shop around or wait for the new models in Crandall's next exhibition.

--Ken Goldberg