<nettime> Jordan Crandall: Drive

[Gena Gbenga <gbenga@blast.org>]

Drive is a seven-part video installation that combines traditional
cinema with military tracking, identifying, and targeting technologies. 
Incorporating old and new, analog and network, civilian and military,
Drive moves toward a post-cinematic language - one that has specific
historical and political resonances.

Jordan Crandall writes:  "Cinema has helped to establish the set of
conventions through which the world of movement has come to be
represented.  In computerized tracking and targeting systems, however,
movement is indicated differently.  It is represented by way of its
processing through databases.  The format of the database is
superimposed upon the cinematic image-field, fusing with it to generate
a new kind of moving image.  Harnessed to escalating new technologies --
embedded within warfare complexes both national and corporate -- these
new images do not so much represent movements as track them."  As Peter
Weibel describes, they mark a shift from presentation to processing.

Moving from the cinematic paradigm to that of the visual database, Drive
emphasizes the militarized complexes within which contemporary images
are embedded, their emerging formats of regimentation, and the
particular ways in which they 'arm' vision.  It marks the ways in which
these forms and processes are deeply connected to changing patterns of
perception and embodiment.  

Alongside this militarized 'strategic seeing,' Drive registers an
exhibitionistic impulse -- a 'seeing back.'  This impulse is bound up in
new processes of identification, integration, and incorporation as
sources of erotic pleasure.   Drive looks at the new erotic worlds that
open up within what can otherwise be seen solely as a technics of
control.  These involve new couplings of humans and machines; new senses
of intimacy and invasive pleasures that usurp private space; and new
forms of simultaneously seeing and being seen - which are helping to
change the contours of the body, its desires, and its sense of
orientation in the world.  

Accompanying the exhibition is a 256-page book, including an
introduction by Peter Weibel, which serves as both a catalogue of the
exhibition and a collection of Crandall's writings from the years
1994-99.  A symposium will also take place during the exhibition.

Jordan Crandall:  Drive
Curated by Peter Weibel
27 January - 12 March, 2000
Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz
Sackstrasse 16, A-8010 Graz Austria
tel +43 316 82 91 55
fax +43 316 81 54 01
email post@neuegalerie.stmk.gv.at
http://www.neuegalerie.at

Drive has been produced with the support of Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum
Joanneum; Eyebeam Atelier, New York; and Filmmakers Collaborative, New
York.  Additional support has been provided by ZKM, Karlshrue.  DVD
production has been provided by Zuma Digital, New York.

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