Jordan Crandall
Heatseeking 1999-2000
Sjoukje van der Meulen

The term “artist” has become a limiting term in our interdisciplinary world. This is also true for Jordan Crandall, artist for sure, but one who since the early 1990s has operated as a theorist, editor, moderator and film director in a wide spectrum of on-line and off-line artistic contexts. In one of his early projects, Crandall collected and edited “publications” for Blast, a series of Duchampian valises packed with a multitude of writings, objects, performances and diagrams made by a variety of people. He has also curated installations for Blast to display these collective assemblages which are exploring new editorial processes as a result of the then emerging communication networks and environments such as the Internet and MUDs and MOOs. Furthermore, he has moderated critical on-line forums for Eyebeam on the political and cultural status of artistic practices on the Net, and written theoretical and politically engaged essays all along the 1990s.

Only recently, since 1998, has Crandall moved into the realm of video and film, with Drive and Heatseeking as first tangible results. Both works -- one a series of seven videos, the other seven “tracks” of film -- are investigating the way in which digital technology has changed the nature of cinema. In Drive, for example, Crandall explores how military targeting, tracking and identifying systems (by infrared-, night-vision-, surveillance- and targeting cameras) are implicating a fundamentally new system of representing movement, on the basis of methods of analysis that are operating via a database registering, storing, indexing, and displaying information. In Heatseeking, Crandall has transformed the scientifically engaged experiments of Drive (even if on a metaphorical level) into a more persuasive cinematic language -- in fact, he did away here with his somewhat hermetic avantgardist rhetoric. Of course, the title Heatseeking directly refers to military tracking technologies based on detecting and analyzing heat, but on another level it alludes to how the human body and mind have “interiorized” these technological circuits. Since Crandall is not interested in technology per se, but in its effects on the human subject, the tracks are focusing on human beings within a space that is technologically controlled and determined: a woman under surveillance on the Mexican border, a topless woman driving a car, the tension between a nude man and woman on a huge navy vessel, all in dialogue with symbolically charged technological objects.

All the “tracks” in Heatseeking are ultimately analyzing the poetics and politics of seeing in relation to the construction of the image in digitally driven cinematic technologies. But how, more precisely, does Crandall visualize the dialogue between technology and psychology within the environment of sexually charged interior spaces? “Track” one, for instance, is a short film about two young muscled men -- one black, the other white -- engaged in a golf play but gradually becoming entangled in an almost Greco-Roman wrestling match. The first black and white shots, evoking early Hollywood tropes, introduce the youthful “gladiators,” while the last shot shows nothing but an empty hole in the perfectly kept green golf field. In between, the combat unfolds while both the cinematic techniques (targeting cameras employed in the Gulf War, infra-red and surveillance cameras), and the camera positions change constantly (from one side to another, birds-eye view, extreme close-ups etceteras), and the sparingly used sound (the boys' breathing or golf strokes) carefully builds up the scene's climax.  The final track, number seven, shows a sexy blond girl driving along the highway in nothing but her underpants, inspired by Cronenburg's Crash. Using different cameras and positions, the short film evokes a layered and intertwined reality: from a close up of the woman behind the wheel in a glamorous Hollywood style, followed by shots which register her through the rearview mirror, to a black and white surveillance camera image, watching the car from the outside. In addition, the whole erotic scene is alternated with esthetic images from the American highway system and virtual images of a computer game, dramatized once again by sounds of cars flashing by, and of the crashes and noises of computer games, while the images are accelerating towards the end of the film.

Digital technology and ever-faster computers are joining forces to produce advanced audiovision, thus implicating the vanishing point of film as we have known it. The classic institution for the mediation of the moving image -- cinema -- has evolved into an episode in the history of audiovisual media. Cinema has entered a stage in which it is not necessarily seen in the movie theatre for Zerstreung, as Benjamin would have it, but is experienced in new ways in a variety of audiovisual works. This is one reason why Crandall's tracks can best be viewed in dialogue with one and another in an installation, like in his solo-show in Graz (2000). Yet film has not only fallen apart into a myriad of audiovisual media in this post-cinematic area, as theorists like Sigfried Zielinksi have argued, but its technology and the latter's effect on how the image is constituted, as Crandall writes and shows, is moving towards a “post-cinematic language” and “semiotics.”