Saturday, March 9, 2013
Some Music
Here are some records that have been close to me the past 13 months or so. Some of them are old, some were released in 2012. They are in no particular order:
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Security, Territory, Population: Hope Peterson's The Night is a Moat
Foucault,
in his annual lecture series at the Collège de France in 1978 under
the title Security,
Territory, Population,
elaborated the dispositifs of surveillance and subjectification
familiar to readers of Discipline
and Punish
and The
Will to Know
with a greater emphasis on something that he considered to be
relatively recent: the technologies of security. The disciplinary
regulation of normality and abnormality has, Foucault argued in these
lectures, altered its focus from the production and control of
normalized individuals to the administration of quantifiable
populations in delimited territories based on large-scale analysis
and prediction.
The
title of given to this lecture series is important as it serves to
highlight the thematics of Hope Peterson's installation at RAW
Gallery, The
Night is a Moat.
This installation is the latest articulation of an ongoing series of
investigations into security, territory, population, surveillance and
precarity under the title Threshold
Economics
begun in 2009. (Other findings from this artistic project have been
exhibited as part of the My
Winnipeg
show in Paris, Sète, Ottawa and Winnipeg). All of the work in this
series involves hand-held camera footage of the artist's apartment
and its immediate nocturnal winter environs, accompanied by a mélange
of amplified sounds all-too-well-known to any apartment dweller:
steam-radiators clanging and hissing, cars passing by, muffled voices
and footsteps, a constant mechanical pulse/whine.
In the case of The Night is a Moat, the sense of enclosure (both protective and claustrophobic) that pervades the works comprising the Threshold Economics project is further augmented by the gallery space itself – a basement, with its lights turned particularly low which requires viewers to take a moment to allow their eyes to adjust to the dark. A large video screen is mounted in a curtained-off area, thereby making it not immediately visible from the gallery's entry, as the sound reverberates throughout the bricked room. At first exposure to the environment produced by Peterson's installation, we are posed a question, or, rather, exposed to a mystery. What is happening? This sense of being involved in the investigation of a mystery is underlined by the title of the installation, which evokes noir radio serials of the 1940s – an important source of inspiration to the artist. It is here that the affect of noir mystery combines with the thematics of security, territory and population by means of two main features in this exhibition: the deployment of surveillance and the police.
Peterson's
camera work primarily functions in two imbricated ways: as mimesis of
CCTV and as hand-held personal recordings (as one would record a car
accident or an assault, for example, on one's iPhone). Both of these
modes of surveillance – call them the corporate and the subjective
– are ubiquitous in the contemporary socio-political configuration;
Peterson's usage of both surveillance modes is complex. On the one
hand, we have the personal mode: the “occupant-subject,”
apparently confined to her apartment, peers through security keyholes
to record ominously-lit men standing in corridors or (as we will come
to later) being led away by the Winnipeg police. At other times, the
occupant-subject looks through windows, often with what seems to be
some trepidation; more often than not, the streets are deserted and
we are treated to imagery that are almost sensuous in their treatment
of light, shadow, colour and form. (Trees silhouetted in the night
sky, multi-coloured lights from cars and streetlamps, parking lots
whose cover of snow give them the appearance of planes of pale blue).
I say almost
sensuous; the video image has the graininess that characterizes
footage shot on a cellphone or the like. (This is a deliberate effect
on Peterson's part, as the footage was, in fact, shot in HD). When
the streets are not empty, there are overtones of violence: a woman
walks to her car at speed, as though fleeing someone; a man and woman
have a heated argument that threatens to become physical; policemen
arrest a man, ask questions of a woman, smoke cigarettes as they
wait. Two complementary consequences can be drawn: the
occupant-subject is in a territory that is (or is perceived to be)
threatening to her. However, she is (or perceives herself to be) in a
protective zone; she is not exposed to the violence she records. (It
is in this context that it should be pointed out that the audio
component of the installation is, despite being reminiscent at times
of David Lynch's Eraserhead,
actually becomes soothing and womb-like after sustained listening.)
The night is indeed a moat, that is, a protective apparatus designed
to keep a territory secure.
“...and
always cops.” We have already noted the presence of the police on a
few occasions now: taking a man in the apartment into custody,
standing outside waiting. For Foucault, the development of the idea
that the state should have a police force as distinct from the
diplomatic/military apparatus is essential in securing a territory
internally by constructing a population (a quantifiable entity with
predictable tendencies) out of a group of heterogeneous people. As in
Foucault, the police serve an ambiguous function in The
Night is a Moat.
On the one hand, they are, as one might expect, part of a
disciplinary apparatus; the police lead away a criminal, defined as
“someone who is lead away by police.” They survey the
neighbourhood, standing by their cars with lights flashing. (The
section of the video when the cops are standing in the snow smoking
cigarettes as if waiting for something to happen is one of the more
chilling moments in the work.) On the other hand, the sections when
the police are on screen are actually few and far between, the
majority of the video spent meditating on the landscape. William
Burroughs is reported to have quipped that “a fully functioning
police state needs no police,” and so it is with The
Night is a Moat:
the absence of police is affected by their presence, which is to
say, the disciplinary function of the police is transformed into an
auto-security feature of the landscape itself. The sophistication of
Peterson's analysis of the contemporary structures of surveillance,
security and population-control is all the more remarkable for the
modesty of its means – image, sound, space. Thus we can only hope
to ask her again: Watcher,
what of the night?
Hope
Peterson – The
Night is a Moat
RAW
Gallery of Architecture and Design
290
McDermot Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba
18
October – 10 November 2012
all images stills from Hope Peterson's Threshold Economics (2011), save the second gallery image which is courtesy of Robert Szkolnicki.
Friday, December 21, 2012
21 Shelters for the Apocalypse That Never Comes
Begin by reading Giovanni Tiso's piece here, and then choose how you wish to envy the dead:
Und die musik
Monday, October 22, 2012
Lei Cox's Being There: Digital's Hidden Dimension
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.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
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