A New Image Status: Tracking New Targets
Paranoia, in some respects, is a modern-day development
of an ancient, archaic sense that animals still have that they're being watched...
It's a lingering sense that we had long ago, when we – our ancestors – were
very vulnerable to predators, and this sense tells them they're being watched…
probably by something that's going to get them...
Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York, Carol Publ., 1990)
It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system
of power but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social,
economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.
Michel Foucault, in Truth and Power (New York, Prometheus
Books, 1979)
For the first time in Brazil, Jordan Crandall exhibits
Track 3 – Compulsion/ Registration, a segment of his videowork Drive (1998/2000). Besides his intense theoretical
production, he is one of the outstanding figures in the visual arts segment
who deal with new digital-electronic media, giving emphasis to cultural and
political implications of the use of new system technologies.
A video-installation in DVD originally
made up by seven segments, Drive combines
traditional cinematographic language and structure to new digital technology
systems conceived for military use – mechanisms for identification, tracking
and localization. The result is an installation on the perception and conditioning
of the human body – especially the vision – to technological displays.
Even before the recent growth of
increasingly powerful and efficient surveillance technologies, several artists
had explored the dynamics of seeing and being seen, investigating issues brought
by new monitoring practises. By assimilating the intense technological changes
that brought about more compact equipment, mingled to digital innovations
in communications, entertainment and marketing as well as to military technologies,
the surveillance field became more complex, multi-faceted and sufficiently
developed for cultural incursions that investigate the implications of image
and information accumulation in our society. In Drive,
Crandall centers the focus of his technological research in mechanisms of
optical control, of computerized vision, and in the displacement of these
practises from military to other instances.
When presenting Drive at the Sandra Gering Gallery (NY,
Oct., 1998) the artist displayed some biometric high-tech devices such as
a portable digital Glasstron (a
kind of last-generation walkman for the eyes) or a retinal scanner, all of
them prototypes of controlled use, to which Crandall had access thanks to
the corporations´ confidence that his research inspired. His work invited
the viewer to dive into a sensorial experience usually not accessible to the
common audience. The human eye was superposed to militarized practices and
compared to a missile; this “militarized strategic vision” added to the suggestion
of increasing militarization of the human eye. The artist’s ideas on watchfulness
reminds us of Hal Foster
[1]
comments: “…such was the CNN effect of the Gulf War for
me: repelled by politics, I was riveted by the images, by a psycho-techno-thrill
that locked me in, as smart bomb and spectator locked in as one. A thrill
of techno-mastery – my mere human perception became a super machine vision,
able to see what it destroys and to destroy what it sees”. When inserting
these high-tech ready-mades into a contemporary art institution, Crandall
makes a subtle commentary on the possibilities of trading these products,
and at the same time shakes our trend to fetishize or venerate new technologies,
thus pointing to the complex relation between the notion of authorship rights
and digital art.
In the Drive series, associated to the optical experience, the notion of
movement is what seems to impel the work, both conceptually and formally.
Crandall explores the motto of the moving image and associates it to the body:
“I am interested in how these transformations of the image, of vision, and
of the body, mediated by technology, are embroiled in new regimes of fitness,
new formats of adequacy. They involve co-ordination between bodies, machines,
and images. I like to see the image always in terms of this kind of body-machine-image
cluster”.
With the advent of new digital technologies,
incorporated by the war industry and global militarized systems, movement
would consist in - in the artist’s conception as explicit in this work - not
to represent action, but to track it,
thus pointing to a change in movement process representation. This is what is seen in Drive: the artist does not register movements, but maps and tracks
them. Where formerly movement was described as taking place along a single
line, it is progressively configured in a variety of dimensions in synchrony.
If we ponder that movement not necessarily equals narrative impetus, here
understood as transmission of a flow of information that may be equated, calculated,
it is not difficult to assimilate that, by activating a single command, a
man or a woman in town or at home suddenly becomes a mapped body, turned into
both a natural form and a set of co-ordinates.
Drifting between the kinematic paradigm
and that of the visual database, Drive
emphasizes the militarized complexes in which contemporary imagery is immersed,
its new rule formats, and the particular ways by which our vision is conditioned
and “armed”. This new vision – an “armed vision”
[2]
– activates rules and conventions that deeply alter our
patterns of perception and assimilation. One among possible developments thereof
is the identification of new types of erotic worlds that begin to emerge within
this universe of surveillance and control techniques. This new erotic dimension
allows the emergence of pairs made up of man and machine,
as well as new perceptions and sensations of intimate and invasive pleasures
that take hold of the private space, and new forms of seeing and being seen.
That leads to the arising of new exhibitionist, voyeuristic or sado-masochist
sensations that are helping to change the very body contours, its desires
and sense of orientation in the world.
In the intimate and stylized atmosphere
in which takes place the quasi-narrative of Track 3 – Compulsion/Registration, where sensuality and some perversion
nervously meet, one may feel an urge to reflect on the limits of voyeurism
and surveillance, on the private space and the monitored existence installed
by mechanisms of surveillance and control that increasingly permeate our existence in the contemporary
metropolis. Where does surveillance begin
and voyeurism end? Is it possible to draw or identify a tangible border, that
allows for a discussion on ethical considerations, in the vast network
of actions that pervade this indefinite territory? The pertinence of ethical discussions in this field is reinforced
in a control society as our present
one, where vigilance mechanisms are incorporated even by the entertainment
industry, in doubtful reality shows that disorderly proliferate throughout the world – an undoubtedly symptomatic
media phenomenon that can not be properly dealt with here.
Still in Track 3, Crandall uses images that may be seen, in his own words,
as technological metaphors, so as to speak of technology in a familiar way,
by resorting to simple things like the telephone or the car. Among the somewhat
specific obsessions perceivable in Track
3 is the scene where
an actress makes a repetitive choreography with a telephone – where one can notice a pattern in the gestures,
a compulsion to decode. This is a motto that interests Crandall: “…a way of
thinking how visual systems and high technology are instilling in us certain
habits, routines and ways of behaviour – things and situations we fit into”
[3]
.
The suggestion of the presence of
the body and its senses, recurrent in this video, seems to bring with it a
dimension of associated pleasure. A pleasure of “fitting in/into”, to occupy or be
contained; to be controlled by something.
The title meaning – Drive – is mainly
to set things going, among other possible senses. In this work what is at
stake is not only a driving/moving process but also a reverse process, one
of being taken, conducted by technology or by desire. A reverse system emerges
in this universe, where the act of seeing becomes that of being seen, by means
of advanced systems of computerized networks and databases. In this investigating
process, Crandall examines another path of representation development that
runs parallel to, and intertwines with our civil existences: “Being tracked and codified is also part of being someone who matters,
someone who is paid attention to. It is a process of ‘coming into
being’"
[4]
.
The artist had already announced
his affinity with such issues in Suspension,
a multimedia installation presented in Documenta
X, in Kassel (1997), where he combined several types of projections, but
then to create an interactive space where distinctions between real and virtual
were mingled, while the visitor tried to adapt himself to an environment that
changed as he walked around the room. In Drive,
Crandall alludes to reconsidering the image in motion. He brings into discussion how images affect us today, both physically
and psychologically, and how they are deeply
connected to changes in our perception and assimilation patterns, in a powerful
combination of fetishism and desire, public and private space, sensuality
and sterility. His work impels us to consider the institutions and corporations
behind these ways of vision, and how we are being affected by them.
In this post-cinematic set of images,
as Crandall likes to refer to it, there emerges a condensed and technologically
hybrid space, where body and machine collapse, in a process that produces strangeness
in our contemporary communication and information
culture.
It could even be – daringly – observed that, in
the hybrid visuality that the work assembles, one may identify an improbable,
but stimulating, combination
of the surveillance historical analysis by Foucault (specially on the structure of the Panopticon
[5]
), to the concepts of the critique of post-modern visuality
and of simulation proposed by Baudrillard (the hyper-real space and the ever
more blurred distinction between real and virtual
[6]
); such combination might be transposed to an atmosphere
that is nearer to William Gibson’s enclosed cyberspace universe
[7]
– very close to our present condition in contemporary metropolis.
The result may be understood as a diagnosis pertinent to our present techno-culture
– a situation in which the urge for critical discussion on the real threat
to civil freedom, materialized by omnipresent systems of control and surveillance,
is imperative.
[1]
Hal
Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 1996).
[2]
A concept on which Crandall writes
extensively (see more at www.jordancrandall.com).
[3]
Excerpt
from a conversation with Lawrence Rinder, contemporary art curator at the
Whitney Museum, in a presentation at The
Kitchen, New York, Jan. 1st 2001.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and
Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
[6]
Notions evoked in Jean Baudrillard’s writing, specially
in Simulacra and Simulation (Michigan:
University of Michigan Press, 1995). By the same author, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana University Press, 1995) refers
to many issues of Crandall’s work.
[7]
Concept introduced
in William Gibson’s seminal sci-fi novel Neuromancer (Ace Books, 1995).