Jordan Crandall: Driving Images
Brian Holmes

In a classic Frankfurt School text, The Eclipse of Reason (1946), Max Horkheimer remarked on the degree of freedom involved in driving a car, as compared to riding a horse. The car goes much faster, carries us much further, but it brings a multitude of new constraints: "There are speed limits, warnings to drive slowly, to stop, to stay within certain lanes, and even diagrams showing the shape of the curve ahead.... It is as if the innumerable laws, regulations, and directions with which we must comply were driving the car, not we." Could this point not apply to today's information highways, where we both drive and are driven? Yet Horkheimer leaves aside an important dimension of the problem. It was with the older figure of animal transport that Freud best captured the relationship between human reason and unconscious impulsions: "Often the rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."(1)

For a decade now, Jordan Crandall has been exploring the ambiguous zones between autonomous agency and vital or obsessional compulsion, as they emerge in the use of the networked devices that he calls "vehicles." His early, performance-oriented collaborations incorporated computer technology into combinatory systems designed to catalyze group creations – utopian experiments in non-hierarchical communities. Yet as the internet developed at a pace with economic globalization, Crandall came increasingly to see heightened individual mobility as the flip side of a total mobilization of human energies in the technologically advanced societies. The "degree of freedom" that preoccupied Horkheimer and Freud became a question within the new communications media.

Crandall's response to the massive corporate penetration of the internet was double. On the one hand, he drew on the experience of the interactive performances to organize large-scale email forums, contributing to an immanent critique of the internet and the art practices it supports. But he also began to create video-based installations for museum spaces, visually representing the ways in which military tracking and targeting systems are now able to reach through the screens of our computer vehicles, to mingle with the subjective experiences of flesh and psyche. The development of his projects since the early 1990s offers exceptional insights into the possibilities and the pressures of existence within a networked society.

Off the Page

The Blast boxes, multiples created in New York from 1991 to 1996, were collaboratively produced sets of artistic proposals – objects and texts, but also descriptions and maps of actions. Conceived as publications, they sought to redistribute the traditional hierarchy of roles implied by a printed page (editor, author, illustrator, reader). In the tradition of the artist-audience relations developed by Fluxus and the more participatory forms of conceptual art, they suggested decentered, "horizontal" structures of cooperation and feedback, predating the internet linkages we know today, but already influenced by the branching model of hypertext scripts. The boxes themselves were conceived not as objects but as vehicles – devices "to orient the reader and to make this reader aware of the procedures of orientation."(2) By substituting a provisional assemblage of elements for the permanent binding of a book, the boxed sets offered the potential of a combinatory system to be played out in space, rather than contemplated statically in the mind's eye. Indeed, Blast 2 dealt explicitly with "The Spatial Drive."

Already in 1991-92, these young artists were experimenting with feedback loops and the relations of virtual to actual reality – before the internet had made such notions the stuff of everyday life. The establishment in New York of an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) called "The Thing," then access to the online text-based virtual environments called MUDs and MOOs beginning around 1993, made it possible to experiment with interactive, real-time fictions, and to combine this spatially disjunctive role-playing with embodied performances in a gallery. In this way the computerized "page" could effectively be created by the reader, but also embodied, materialized, acted out in three dimensions. One of Jordan Crandall's key references at the time was the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, whose Parangolé garments had brought the color combinations of the constructivist picture plane into social space, realizing a virtual utopia. In a similar way, the participants of Blast could now drift and dance through the city and the internet, exchanging desires, cultures, identities, realizing a utopian dream of freedom.

This flamboyant, fictionalized experimentation reached its peak in 1996 with the stageset of Blast 5, inspired by the avant-garde architectural designs of the Soviet artists Klucis and Lavinskii. It was conceived as a multimedia performance space, with video projections from the web appearing behind the stage and printed materials displayed in racks on the architectural frame; video recordings of the performances were uploaded live into the rapidly expanding internet. At this point the box or "vehicle" had become a solid sculptural object, a real prop and a purely virtual vehicle, to signify that the Blast project had moved beyond its initial publicational format – into the worldwide electronic networks.

Distributed Environments – Architectures of Engagement

Utopianism mingles politics with pleasure, exuberance, play. But it can only be sustained by communities that have managed to carve out an exceptional social space, at a distance from prevailing norms. This state of grace would rapidly evaporate for artists using the internet -– just as their dreams were becoming technically feasible. Jordan Crandall began to sense the shift around 1995, when he did a show at the Galerie des Archives in Paris. Entitled Blast Conversional Archive, it brought the boxed sets together in a gallery space, but also included an interactive online component and a web site in which scattered Blast projects are indexed to a random pattern of floating, hyperlinked bubbles (this "conversional archive" is still online, at www.blast.org). The archive was a first attempt to create a broader, more accessible platform for the distribution of the utopian adventure. For the same occasion, Crandall began drawing diagrams of the phenomenological relations between various spaces and formats of perception and interaction. This theoretical reflection on the structures of networked relations contains the germs of what would be his first major museum installation, suspension, at Documenta X in 1997.

Suspension appears to the visitor as a room bathed in washes of colored light, modulating at rhythms which seem to inhere to the environment. Gradually we realize that certain patterns register our own movements; another projection is visibly a website. Polished stainless-steel shelves hold strange, hand-sized design elements, the so-called Rhythmic Fittings, which do not quite fit comfortably in the hand. Through pacing and the bodily incorporation of rhythms, the visitor seeks a tentative fit into a cross-formatted space of technologically mediated perception – an interface where part of the input is coming from elsewhere and is perhaps being manipulated by other people. These "distributed environments" are an increasingly important part of experience today. They are accessed through virtual transportation machines, mass-produced or customized vehicles which aim to configure to the human body, and which in their turn demand an adaptation of the flesh, the intelligence, the imagination; thus they exert a normative influence on society. Suspension offers an indissolubly theoretical and experiential model of immersion into such spaces. Like the Blast vehicles, it configures a pliable, tactical space, orienting the visitor while pointing to increasingly complex, socialized procedures of orientation.(3)

The nature of distributed environments is to distribute intelligence, indeed subjectivity itself, exteriorizing aspects of what were formerly considered interior, conscious operations (paying attention, focusing, orienting oneself, predicting circumstances, seeking information or interlocutors). Philosophers in the seventies and eighties spoke of a decentering of the subject, which they conceived as an opening of the self to the other. But what this has also come to mean, under the conditions of networked globalization, is that part of the deck you are playing with is under the control of someone or something else, far away. And the question arises very practically, politically, today: if we are not fully present to ourselves, how can critical judgment be effectively taken? At Documenta X, Jordan Crandall began an attempt to answer this question, launching a program in which Blast "docks" with another institutional partner to set up a worldwide email debate. To date, four of these large-scale projects have been undertaken: with Documenta X; with the digitial arts foundation Eyebeam Atelier; with the "Union of the Imaginary" freelance curators' association; and with the London-based International Institute of the Visual Arts (iniva).4 These forums, reaching as many as 800 subscribers at the height of the <eyebeam><blast> collaboration, are rhythmically structured with a series of invited guests appearing at more-or-less regular intervals, and also include a certain number of attentive "hosts" who accompany the discussion. The structuring acts not to inhibit but rather to encourage spontaneity, polemic, intervention. Many people form extremely tight bonds through these forums. They create an intimate and yet also highly public space which remains close to the concerns of the artistic milieu, but is at least partially unburdened of its customary hierarchies and orders of speaking. There is an attempt here to pursue the experimentation of the early nineties into the full-blown space of transnational exchanges – to transform the naive and hopeful constructivist stageset of Blast 5 into a pragmatically effective platform, a credible and functioning architecture of engagement.

Seeing Back

In the early, utopian period of experimentation, telecommunications interfaces were mainly conceived in terms of a possibility to interact with distant partners, opening up new intersubjective freedoms. Today we are faced with the looming reality of the database, informed by technologies of tracking and capable of implementing a multitude of targeting devices and strategies. These technologies, of overwhelmingly military origin, are currently being used for marketing, taking advantage of the multiplication of networked environments where electronic windows both provide and gather information. Jordan Crandall now speaks of a "body-machine-image complex," which structures "a provisional interiority in terms of routings through the body that help to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior."(5) This means that the militarized image sees us, as much or more than we see it; that it informs us in the double sense of the word, extending its stimuli into bodily and psychic intimacy, and remodeling the perceptual and communicational environment on the basis of the information gathered.

It is this active, sighted image that Crandall has attempted to represent in the video installation Drive, first shown at the Neue Galerie of Graz, Austria, in February 2000. Divided into seven "tracks," the installation experiments with multiple presentation media (individual viewing goggles and a portable DVD deck, in addition to wall projections), but above all, with different registration- and analysis-protocols inside the image. The green traceries of movement-tracking software configure around a running body. Coordinate grids appear within images shot from the eyes of smart bombs or missiles. Reddish thermal imaging plays against the eerie green of night-vision video recordings. Certain tracks oscillate between recording formats, for example: a hand-cranked camera using black-and-white film, Hi8 video, a surveillance camera, digital video from a wearable DVcam. Although some of the footage is borrowed (demonstration films from arms manufacturers), the majority of the tracks have been filmed with actors under Crandall's direction. Perhaps the most succesful follows a woman through passive-aggressive sexual scenarios, mirror and telephone scenes, and into the molded seats of a sensual automobile – with the camera inciting, configuring, and registering the drives. Another track stages the permutating subject-positions of a fantasmatic matrix, based on Freud's case-study, "A Child is Being Beaten." Gunshots, explosions, sounds of slapping flesh, voices and the pulses of light sink into the rhythm of your own footsteps, perhaps your own heartbeat, as you pace from room to room. None of these images yet register the presence of the visitor – we are still dealing here with the representation of a process-image, and not with a live instantiation of tracking technologies or modulating environments. Yet one can suspect that real-time dataprocessing will emerge in Crandall's future installations, given his extraordinary capacity for research and his curiosity not just for technology, but for the way that it evolves in tune with social and intimate relations.

Perhaps more uncertain is the future of the Blast collaborations. Prolonging the breakthrough of the conceptual artists who first integrated space for critical dialogue into the form of their work, the email debates have sought to open up a new, intersubjective field of reflexivity, responding to and displacing the norms of distributed environments. Will such initiatives be able to answer the powerfully normative machinery represented in the tracks of Drive? In his theoretical writing, Crandall describes the dataprocessing capacities of the corporate and state powers as giving rise to a demographic realm that constitutes an "image of the people" through "a calculus of manageable interests, opinions, patterns, and functions." He seeks to understand "how the logic of demography has become a particular kind of improved democracy," how its feedback circuits produce and depend on "statistical persons."

The degree of freedom that we may enjoy within such an "improved democracy" becomes an urgent question, as the military-economic engines reach beneath our animal skins, again showing their enormous power to convince the human species that we are driving in directions of our own choosing. The challenge today, for artists working with networked environments, is to continue creating interactive protocols that straddle the on/offline divide; to deploy richer, more sophisticated archives, and to link them into shared situations which may offer some chances for seeing back through this emerging, self-embodying "image of the people."

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 15; the first quote is from Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1996), p. 98.

2. From an interview with the artist, in Jordan Crandall, Drive (forthcoming from MIT Press), p. 218.

3. The theoretical ground of suspension is brilliantly covered in the recent book book by Jonathon Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

4. Information about the Blast forums can be found at www.blast.org; a complete archive is available for <eyebeam><blast> and a book version is forthcoming from D.A.P.

5. This and the following quotes are from Drive, p. 24.