Even for a generation weaned on video games and MTV (which presumably includes many in the Greater New York show), Jordan Crandall’s Drive (Track 1)—the first component of a seven-part video series—has the power to arrest. With an aesthetic somewhere between music video, a late-night Cops episode, and digital broadcast "footage" of the Gulf War, Drive rests uneasily in a landscape filtered through a set of historically disparate, culturally and politically loaded technologies including black-and-white 8mm and 16mm film, digital video, and computerized targeting and tracking systems. Within this condensed, technologically hybrid space, the body and the machine collapse into one another, resulting in a mode of operation hardly unfamiliar to today’s communication/information culture.

Motion—this is what propels the piece conceptually and formally. From a single monitor suspended just below pipework in a dank, raw cranny of P.S.1’s boiler room, a silent, fast-paced barrage of shots flashes: a wrist flexes, a bus passes, a man in a business suit weaves through a crowd, a teenager runs down a dark alley, an eye blinks. "Caught on tape"–type scenes of a pursuit through an abandoned industrial space are intercut with crowded, colorful, urban streetscapes and with sensuously lit, close-up motion studies of a body that could pass as a contemporary, disrobed version of the industry worker in Lewis W. Hine’s Powerhouse Mechanic (1925). Although the beat of the piece as a whole is quick, Crandall choreographed a precise rhythm that interweaves slow-motion shots with sped-up shots, a lingering or steady camera with one jounced by the cameraman’s walk, various cycles of repetition, and zooms and pans that alternately bring the image into focus or abstract it entirely. Adding into the mix a completely different trajectory, Crandall incorporated a military tracking technology that traces the on-screen movements with eerie green contour lines that emerge from tiny telescopic crosshairs floating over the action. The monitor is raised well above a comfortable line of sight, close to the ceiling of an oddly situated room in which the floor begins at about eye level. The piece is viewed through an open door, and the lack of steps leading into the elevated room makes the installation literally inaccessible and lends it a faintly Alice in Wonderland-like feel. The general effect is one of witnessing a frenzied yet carefully coordinated operation of surveillance that fluidly penetrates everything from the mundane to the sketchy.

Productivity. Efficiency. Economy. Drive is the product of a world busily decoding the genome, engineering handguns and personal computers that can instantaneously recognize their owners, and biochemically altering groceries that (for our convenience) are now available for purchase on-line. Where once movement was described by a single, progressive line, it now configures multidimensionally, synchronically. In Drive, sequences that verge on creating narrative space (a sidewalk scene, a pan across an empty warehouse) are momentarily flattened into surfaces to be inscribed. Motion does not always equal narrative thrust; rather, it exists as the transmission of a stream of information that can be charted and calculated. With the flip of a technological switch, a man in the street suddenly becomes a body mapped—simultaneously a natural form and a set of coordinates. The corpse emerges as a corpus of knowledge.

As Crandall writes about the piece, "movement is no longer seen as much as processed—or rather, it is represented by way of its processing." Drive’s tracking has neither the wide-eyed naïvete of Edward Muybridge’s science-driven motion studies, nor the paranoid mentality of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (October 3–25, 1969), in which the artist follows unsuspecting people in the street. With its mix of analog and network, civilian and military media, Drive neither heralds nor denounces contemporary culture's data-hungry mindset. The old paradigm of linear progression morphs into that of the database.

With its tracking technologies and peculiar perch above the viewer, Drive subtly invokes privilege, power networks, and political organization. The unusual context suggests that we are witnessing something not normally seen by the ordinary public, but the piece’s enclosure in the envelope of the art institution tells us otherwise. Are we privy to a body of information usually locked behind political doors, or dominated by a mechanism of surveillance? That many of these military-derived technologies are now commercially available emphasizes the point. The confusion is intentional: the viewed public collapses into the viewing public, and conclusions are deferred in favor of strategy. Whether this is unsettling or liberating is contingent upon your frame of mind. Grab your Dramamine.