The
importance of the transition from analogue to digital in the realm of
video art cannot be overestimated; new understandings of the status
of the digital video image were seized with a mixture of enthusiasm
and anxiety by artists seeking to explore the seemingly endless
transformative and malleable qualities of the digital image – its
capacity to be altered, its capacity to be transmitted telematically
and its capacity (or lack thereof) for representation.
These
are some of the issues to which video artist Lei Cox addresses in his
work. A recent (partial) retrospective of his career, Twenty-Six
Years Later (a journey to fiction and back), presented a selection of Cox's work from 1985 to the
present and included a variety of Cox's single-channel and
installation video work. However, the centrepiece of the exhibition
was a triptych entitled Being
There,
itself a composite of three separately produced but related video
works Catching
Sight of Sputnik 2009/11,
Race
2010/11
and Auto
Race 2010.
This triptych took up the major part at the end of the gallery, its
centrality signalled by the relative size of the projections (each
segment taking up an entire wall) compared to the other works which
were mounted at a distance from the central installation on much
smaller screens with headphones in order that they not interfere with
the sound of the larger works. The implication here is that the
triptych serves as a kind of summation of Cox's work to date. The
question then becomes what is this summation is being offered here,
and to what future does it point?
To
begin, descriptions of each of the separate videos. Catch
Sight of Sputnik 2009/11
is a characteristically mordant exploration of space-travel
conspiracy theories (e.g. the moon-landing was staged by Stanley
Kubrick etc.) In this video, Cox performs a series of dance-like
manoeuvres – literally, one small step followed by one giant leap
over and over again – in an apparently lunar landscape under a
fantastic star-filled sky at one point traversed by a
retro-futuristic rocket ship. Gradually, an important transformation
occurs: the lunar landscape gradually reveals itself to be a
terrestrial desert, with an all-too terrestrial blue sky above it.
Throughout this revealed fakery, Cox continues his Neil Armstrong
dance.
Race
2010
continues the retro-futurist demystifications of Catching
Sight of Sputnik
in a more deflationary manner. A single, diminutive toy robot
struggles to navigate its way across a desert landscape (as with
Sputnik,
shot along the Salt Lake Flats in Utah). The robot, ill-suited to
movement against so uneven a terrain, frequently falls and must be
restored to verticality by Cox until the robot-toy finally exits the
frame. Such slow, jerky movement is contrasted by the last video in
the triptych – Auto
Race 2010.
In this video, Cox drives at speed in a pick-up truck in the same
desert as the other two works. He described, during his artist talk
at the Gurevich Gallery opening, his activities as a sort of
large-scale tracery – with the movement of the truck scoring
patterns on the earth that followed the patterns of celestial events.
In
all three of these videos, Cox explores the malleability of digital
and “real” space by emphasizing scale: whether the quotidian
scale of a truck driving helter skelter through a desert plain,
through to the pathos-ridden miniscule scale of a toy robot, to the
astronomic scale of the faked moon-landing of the Sputnik
video. As in all of his work, Cox places himself in each of these
videos, but in different relations to the framing space: he is unseen
in the truck tracing patterns that are only visible from an air-born
view-point (significantly not shown in the Auto
Race
work); he is the giant figure picking up the toy robot (such that
only Cox's arm and leg are seen); he is the miniscule figure leaping
around a deserted planetary surface, gradually increasing in size as
the extra-terrestrial reveals its terrestrial reality until he almost
takes up the entire space of the screen.
What
is the function of these changes of scale? I would suggest that two
things are happening here. On the one hand, the human body –
specifically Cox's body – is digitally endowed with certain
extensions of its ability to manipulate its environment by means of
its malleability, thereby giving an unprecedentedly inventive analogy
to Marshal McLuhan's well-known theorization of the essentially
prosthetic nature of technology. On the other hand, there is a
significant extension of the the nature of the digital image itself.
The alterations of scale do not occur only at the figural level (the
artist's image) but also occur at the level of the ground against
which the figure impresses himself. While it is generally held that
the flatness of the digital image enables its malleability – as
Flusser suggests in his book Into
the Universe of the Technical Image
– Cox, by telescoping both figure and
ground, striates the smoothness of the digital image by compelling it
to reveal, in a suitably sci-fi formulation, its
hidden dimension.
