JORDAN CRANDALL
Art and the Cinematographic Experience
in the Age of Panoptic Data Processing
For many cultural philosophers, film is the 20th century's guiding medium.
At the end of the 20th century and the outset of the 21st, more and more artists
see film as their primary reference medium, thus confirming the latter's guiding
function – David Reed in painting, John Baldessari in photography, Douglas
Gordon in video art, to name but a few. Currently, the preferred, not to say
exclusive, preoccupation of the video medium is the cinematographic experience,
as is evidenced by the works of the most respected video artists: Eija-Liisa
Ahtila, Doug Aitken, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Sam Taylor-Wood, Steve McQueen,
etc. However, for these artists – such as Matthew Barney, who transforms Busby
Berkeley's musical choreography ideas in Cremaster I-VI, or Pipilotti Rist, who
appropriates music videos – as for the major cultural philosophers (Slavoj
Zizek, Elisabeth Bronfen), the point of reference is not avant-garde film,
but the Hollywood movie and film as a mass medium. Yet most of these artists
do impose upon the medium the new structures of a multiple narrative which
they have indeed derived from the history of avant-garde film, by using multiple
projections, slow-motion techniques, etc. Today, in many cases art references
the cinematographic experience as its central aesthetic source.
This process of crossing the avant-garde with the
mainstream, of transcending the bounds of aesthetics, culture and production requirements,
articulates an attempt by the art of the early 21st century to become socially
attractive and by the same token, perhaps more effective, by entering upon a
new alliance with the mass media. At the same time, it is also an attempt to
disarm an increasingly militarized society, by using information technology to
re-civilize society.
Drive is a seven-part video installation that combines traditional film technology
with military recognition and target processing techniques, in other words,
that subordinates the history of the film to the history of war, as prescribed
by the modern media-theory of writers from Paul Virilio to Friedrich Kittler.
The cinema has established a series
of conventions for portraying movement. In computer-based tracking and target
processing systems, however, movement is shown in a different way – by processing
computer data. The database's visual format is imposed on the film frame in
such a way that the two technologies become intermingled. Because they use
new digital technologies imbedded in the global systems of the art of war,
what these images achieve is less portraying movement than tracking it in
the form of moving machines (weapons). Such images mark a transition from
the portrayal of movement to the processing of movement. Crandall is one of
the outstanding exponents of a new generation of media artists who are consciously
aware of this shift from representation to data processing and make it the
subject of their work.
Current media art is not concerned
with the production of pictures which facilitate the continuation of art history,
nor is it interested in plundering that history and thereby satisfying the
bourgeois hunger for pictures, as the heroes of video art in the 1980s did.
Against the contemporary social background, where signal and data processing
plays a central role (from military technology to money transactions by international
companies), the new generation of media artists moves within the data landscapes
and provides critical insights into the consequences of the processes on which
our society is based.
An aesthetics of processing, of networking
and targeting technology has replaced the pomp of the images of the past.
Crandall and the new generation of media artists have moved from the ruins
of representation to the practices of processing. This is the only way in
which art can re-civilize particular areas of the military-commercial complex
of the information society. The aesthetic method which they use is connected
to modern media strategies, namely the mediums of film, Internet and television.
This work, which we could call a practice of cross-media, is coordinated with
current practices in the field of global media. The global information forum
found on the Net is the new reference framework, the arena of action, replacing
the picture-frame. From the studio onto the Net, from a picture into physical
space, from physical space to the data realm. The locally bound modi operandi for production and reception
in classical art are expanded into non-local telecommunication spaces.
In its shift from the cinematographic
paradigm to the networked database, Drive highlights the arming of perception and the military complexes
in which modern images are embedded. Armed vision produces regimented formats
that profoundly alter our patterns of perception. If our vision is technically
enhanced, and becomes a weapon, then the subject we are observing becomes
an object, a target, a victim. Potentially, the act of looking becomes a sadistic
act.
With this "strategic perception,"
Drive registers a sexual impulse.
With the transference of militarized target-processing technology to subjects,
the latter become the targets of an erotic desire to dominate and subjugate.
Drive views the new erotic worlds that
open up within a structure in a way that could otherwise only be described
as the observation technique employed by hunters and their prey. These worlds
include new relationships between man and the machine, a new invasive lust
that usurps the private sphere and new ways of seeing and being seen simultaneously
that lend new dimensions to sadomasochistic and exhibitionist or voyeuristic
feelings.
Everyone who passes through an airport today is familiar
with the following scene: before boarding the airplane, the passenger is subjected
to a series of inspections which aim at expanding and insuring the realm of
visibility by erasing every last remnant of invisibility and by dragging every
object that evades visibility into the light. A relatively extensive apparatus,
a network of detectors and cameras, is constructed to place local events under
the dictates of absolute visibility. Thus, at the airport, the regime of the
panoptic principle reigns: everything must be seen and everything must be
shown.
Under the rituals of control, however, quite different libidinal regimes
take form. A social pretext legitimates the massive besiegement of public
and social life with voyeuristic and exhibitionist modes of behavior. The
pleasure principle of the voyeur, to see everything, and the pleasure principle
of the exhibitionist, to show all, have shifted from the fates of private
drives to social norms. Voyeurism, exhibitionism, and narcissism are transformed
from individual-psychological criteria to social categories. These are accompanied
by a narcissistic identification with the all-seeing power of the observer
and infantile castration fears of those who do not want to show all. As Foucault
has already revealed, behind the mechanisms of surveillance lie the mechanisms
of power, which are likewise supported by libidinal mechanisms. These power
mechanisms are formed from psychological mechanisms. Through this entanglement,
exhibitionism and voyeurism transform from illegitimate to legitimate pleasures.
Likewise, the sadistic pleasure associated with controlling the gaze and the
masochistic pleasure associated with subordination under the gaze, are afforded
new liberties in the social realm. Masochistic and sadistic behavior, exhibitionist
and voyeuristic pleasures, invade the public realm and move in new zones whose
gestalt is still undetermined. The morphology of desire appears daily in new
forms. A theater of drives is concealed beneath the masks of control rituals.
The work of Jordan Crandall is the first journey into this new danger
zone. It is already comprehensive in terms of the new sadistic or masochistic
pleasures of the panoptic principle, as a study of the transformation of the
gaze in the age of the panoptic principle between punishment and pleasure,
between pleasure and pain.
The visible field
is one of symbolic order, and just as rejections are necessarily arrived at
in the symbolic order, the field of the visible necessarily arrives at invisible
zones. Many realms of reality are not available to our natural senses. The
naked human eye cannot see them, they are only visible through specially created
instruments. Thus we do not see the world, but, rather, images of a world
that the instruments create for our eyes. If the image is the only reality
that signifies the sensually experienced reality, and if the reality is no
longer available to our natural senses, then it becomes a matter of correctly
interpreting the image. There are, in effect, instruments that penetrate deeper
and further into reality than the human eye. Photographic conditions therefore
also determine the conditions of the world.
The postmodern
formulation of that which is visible refers to the technology of seeing, to
the images of the technological world, to the experience of technical seeing.
Technical seeing teaches us that there is a reality which is invisible (to
the naked eye), but which can be made visible in (technical) images. Visibility
and invisibility, the visible and the hidden, form a new equation in the technical
world: the hidden can become visible; the visible can contain the invisible.
An invisible reality can become visible in images. A repressed reality is
articulated in images because the reality principle is not sufficient to solve
the conflicts. The pleasure principle assures that the psychological function
of attention withdraws from phenomena that do not stir desire – it represses
them. But since desires cannot be satisfied by reality, they are satisfied
through images that function like hallucinations. The result is post-real
satisfaction. The images of the mass media show the social subconscious, repressed
collective desires and fears. A visible world can show the invisible in images.
Actors on the political stage who also cannot achieve the reality principle
produce the depraved and ideologically excluded as images. Through real deeds
they produce images for the mass media in order to make the socially repressed
visible. The postmodern image-theory of simulation, as Baudrillard explains,
is "the desert of the real," the agony and the repression of the
real, precisely because of the fact that the images to which we make reference
become reality. We produce for the images. A postmodern image-theory therefore
does not begin with an observation of the world, but rather with an observation
of the image. The communicative act occurs through images. And this act refers,
in particular, to the shifting of the zones of visibility and diaphanousness.
Visibility is controlled as though with a regulator. The visible field becomes
a mobile hatch; the screen is the regulator that travels along the zones of
visibility. The visible field becomes a variable zone, in which the diaphanous
state of the object is likewise variable. This variable visibility and diaphanousness
is a decisive characteristic of the postmodern world after the technological
transformation of the earth, after the establishment of the rule of electromagnetic
waves and beams via radio, TV, and satellite. Total global control via satellite,
GPS, and data surveillance is precisely this variable visibility and diaphanousness;
its power but also its border.
This variability
of the visual zones and the increasing diaphanousness can also be seen in
the mass media in the realm of entertainment. Today's society of the spectacle,
as Debord denounced the advancing reification of culture – and as Adorno and
Horkheimer had already done in 1947 in their Dialectic of Enlightenment – has reached its final point in the so-called
reality shows and in the afternoon talk shows where people expose their most
intimate emotions. The same panoptic principle, which George Orwell still
felt to be a threat when he summed up his political experience with the totalitarian
systems of National Socialism and Stalinism – the authoritarian system of
total observation, which he described as "Big Brother" in his 1949
novel 1984 – has sunk back into
the entertainment industry. There, however, the panoptic principle is felt
as neither threat nor punishment, but rather as amusement, liberation, and
pleasure.
In the reality
shows Big Brother in Germany, Loft Story in France, and Taxi Orange in Austria, staged by TV stations
for the mass audience, the panoptic principle, “everything must be seen and
all must be shown,” is put into effect more than ever before as a model for
becoming immune to the society of the future. Observation is not a menace;
observation is entertaining. In the field of surveillance the panoptic pleasures
of exhibitionism and voyeurism, or scopophilia, unfold. The TV viewers at
home are members of a television society, inhabitants of a mediatized world,
enlightened in the ways of the artificial, technological far-senses ("tele"
means "far" in Greek) such as television, telephone, telex. They
observe the inhabitants of a long-lost "near-society" without newspapers,
TV, fax, phone, etc.; they watch cave-life, so to speak, which consists of
close communication, face-to-face communication. The container is prison as
entertainment. From the heights of "far-society," the people of
the historical "near-society" are observed like diaphenes, transparent
images. They are the objects of seeing. They cannot see the TV observers,
just as the prisoners could not see the guards. Masculinity, femininity, humanity
become spectacles, objects of the gaze, sources providing the pleasure of
power, the pleasure of sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, scopophilia, and
narcissism.
Andy Warhol was
not only the pope of Pop, but also the pope of soap. In his early video works
and films such as Outer and Inner Space
(1965) and Screen Test (1965) he
exploits the narcissism of his community members. His factory was the first
container in TV history, the first arena for reality TV. The lives of the
members of his factory community were documented as comprehensively as the
technological means available at the time allowed. Every conversation was
tape-recorded, every telephone call documented (see A: A Novel, 1968); there was constant photographing and filming. Warhol
exploited the exhibitionism and narcissism of his factory members and made
use of the voyeurism of the mass media. Just like every sweatshop production,
the owner becomes a millionaire and most of the production workers leave empty
handed or die from amphetamines and other drugs that supported the staging
of them as diaphenes, “eccentrics,” and “originals” – as their radical and
uninhibited physical and mental intimacy exhibited before the cameras. Possession
and destruction are well-known historical strategies of sexuality in the Western
world. Warhol’s world presented these new strategies for the first time: surveillance
is enjoyment; observation is entertaining. Warhol was a pioneer, paving the
way for the soap operas, game shows, and reality shows.
Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984) by Nam June Paik is a further
example of media art that cleared the way for the mass-media game shows and
afternoon talk shows. On the occasion of the Orwell year, 1984, a live broadcast
was made from Centre Pompidou in Paris and the studios of WNET-TV in New York.
A heterogeneous mixture of Pop (Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass,
Urban Sax) and avant-garde (Joseph Beuys, Ben Vautier, John Cage, Maurizio
Kagel) was electronically collaged and transformed. Through a split-screen
technique, the TV picture showed simultaneous events occurring in different
locations. Good Morning, Mr. Orwell
was broadcast at the same time in Korea, the Netherlands, and Germany. The
panoptic principle turned into the pleasure principle.
Two models of
explanation can be offered for this transformation in the reception of the
panoptic principle. On the one hand, a psychological explanation: new forms
of voyeurism and exhibitionism have formed under the new conditions of the
gaze in the technical age. In her influential essay, "Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema" (1975),
Laura Mulvey investigated cinematic spectatorship and came to the conclusion
that film is constructed as an instrument of the male gaze which designs images
of women from a male point of view. In mainstream cinema, the man is the subject
of the gaze and the woman is the object of seeing. The male gaze controls,
and not only enjoys dominance and the pleasure of power to the point of sadism
("pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt – asserting control and subjecting
the guilty person to punishment or forgiveness"), but also enjoys the
infantile "scopophilia," the pleasure involved in looking at other
people's bodies as (erotic) objects. The woman becomes an image, a spectacle.
Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at. The situation of the
warden in the panoptic prison is repeated in the cinema. In the darkness of
the auditorium, neither the figures on the movie screen nor the members of
the audience see the observer, whereas they see the persons on the movie screen.
This situation of the panoptic prison also applies to the spectatorship in
front of the TV screens of game shows and reality shows such as Big Brother. A group of people lives in
a container and is observed by a crowd of cameras. The viewers in front of
the picture screen see everything. The inhabitants of the container see nothing.
Exhibitionism and voyeurism complement each other, like the sadism of control
and the masochism of being controlled. Additionally, the formation of narcissistic
processes of identification with power or an ideal self are made easier, as
is the voyeuristic process of transformation of a gazing subject into an object
subjected to the gaze.
This formation
of new scopophilic pleasures and other pleasures of surveillance also has
a social relevance, which offers the second model of explanation: development
of new forms of desire and of gaze serves for conforming to future social
relations. “Enjoying surveillance“ means enjoying the advancing militarization
of perception and the progressing armament of society. When in fact, as can
be observed, society is militarily and technically arming visibility, when
the experience of the world is determined by the media apparatus from film
to television, and even daily life is ever more mediatized through the omnipresence
of surveillance cameras, then the danger lurks that under this increasing
pressure of surveillance and control, the population will feel a sense of
unease and eventually begin to protest, demonstrate, and even revolt against
the system of control. To avoid civil revolt against the future surveillance
state, the population is acquainted with, and adapted to, progressively increasing
doses through the entertainment media. The entertainment industry has always
fulfilled this function in totalitarian systems: becoming increasingly accustomed
to advancing repression through the entertainment media and voluntarily sacrificing
to surveillance in the containers of the thousand eyes of Doctor Mabuse, voluntarily
becoming the victim of total control. In these new zones of reinforced, technically
armed visibility, surveillance is not perceived as a threat or a punishment,
as Foucault described the disciplinary society, but instead – finally having
arrived at the society of the spectacle – surveillance is enthusiastically
enjoyed. Instead of punishment, surveillance becomes pleasure.
Jordan Crandall's
work introduces our attention critically to these new forms of social adaptation
to totalitarian regimes disguised as enjoying surveillance and as spectacles
of panoptic pleasures and pains, of narcissism, of sadomasochism, of voyeurism
and exhibitionism.
This transformation of surveillance from punishment
to pleasure and the psychological mechanisms on which that is based, as well as
the related structures of power are very explicitly expressed in the films Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock
and Peeping Tom (1960) by Michael
Powell. In these films, the camera becomes a voyeuristic eye, and finally, a
sadistic eye (Peeping Tom). In Discipline and Punish Foucault wrote:
“Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance… We are neither in the
amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” But it seems
apparent to us that in postmodern society, surveillance can become spectacle
and that people can enjoy surveillance as a spectacle because seeing is
entangled with sexuality and power (a further theme of Foucault). Martin Jay,
in Downcast Eyes (1993), wrote:
Freud
came to believe that the very desire to know, rather than being innocent, was
itself ultimately derived from an infantile desire to see, which had sexual
origins. Sexuality, mastery and vision were thus intricately intertwined in
ways that could produce problematic as well as 'healthy' effects. Infantile
scopophilia could result in adult voyeurism or other perverse disorders such as
exhibitionism and scopophobia (the fear of being seen).
Fear too, belongs
in the topology of enjoyment, and horror is also on the psychological road
map of voyeurism. Terror and voyeurism, joy and fear are rings of a common
geometry.
This geometry
shapes the topology of contemporary and future society. Crandall is the first
artist who gives us a vision of this geometry, an insight into a dark zone
of new pleasures and pains within a techno-militaristic controlled society.
His vision of the armed vision of today comments the “fear studies” that accompany
the transformations of American society. Various forms of fear crept out from
the refusal to reform the real conditions of the panoptic principle: sociophobia,
cultural conspiracy, plagues of paranoia. Crandall's cinema shows the Janus-head
of the panoptic principle, from which the cinema arose: seeing and being seen,
visual pleasure and paranoia. His art shows us the two roots of the cinematographic
experience and its dangerous future in a media society based on armed vision.
It shows the real face of a society based on cinematographic media: paranoid
scopophilia as the agent of a panoptic regime.