Installation shot and details: floor covered wall to wall with over 2000 cut down books - rescued en route to the dump after the famous Regent Theatre Book Sale yearly fundraiser, typewriter keys and ribbon bookmark, video loop (The Virtual Resurrection)
Project proposal, 2002
BLIND SPOTS AND DECOYS
I suggest that
technology serves to fragment and dislocate our personal
and collective memory. This body of work explores the
disintegration of context by abrogating memory for the use
of virtual space to cache or ‘save’ information. This
information can only be retrieved by having reference to
agreed and eclectic marks. Juxtaposed is the way we extract
historical knowledge. This knowledge is authenticated by
institutions of recognised belief, legitimised by the label
‘truth’ and obtained by us using controlled systems of
entry or circumscribed rites of passage. We retrieve it by
making reference to physical relics which are presented
here alongside the Judaeo-Christian ethos which underpins
contemporary Western culture. ‘Relic’ includes found
objects, signs or recordings which recall and transmit
information. To entice a consideration of artificial memory
or memoria technica, these relics are used to unsettle and
disorientate the viewer within an installation. This
project is an exploration of our subjectivity to the past
and the way we recycle the past through mediums that serve
to recollect for us.
A WINDOW - and the
“Pearly Gates of Cyberspace”
The prevailing concept and manifesting
aesthetic is inspired by the 1968 around-the-world English
sailing competitor Donald Crowhurst who, after failure in
isolation, due to a disfunctional chronometre to gauge his
orientation, fed an attentive world with false radio
reports about his progress. This work combines perceptions
of truth with mechanisms for memory. Systems of technology
adopt marks to interface with alien matrices, establishing
a collection of arcane codes acceptable to most although
few hold keys to translation.
“A window
into cyberspace, a world constructed and mediated, and
described by some as ‘pan-mnemistic docuverse’ - is one
which offers a premise of all knowledge available to the
individual via corporeal eye, via monitor, via the software
etc. is a diffused presentation of data, whose
incompleteness stimulates us to act on hunches and
intuitions, creating a feeling of spatial freedom. The
limited frame of a window, monitor, lens, spectacle,
viewfinder creates the peephole; it feeds the voyeuristic
fantasy that there is still something infinitely more
thrilling to discover than what is immediately before one’s
eye”.1
The use of the familiar generates a sense
of inclusion while complete access is denied. The software
icon of Gates’ ‘Microsoft Windows’ is a transparent window
framed by a celestial blue which encourages a panoptic
vision toward an information storehouse. Text/graphic
operations are illuminated by the monitor’s omnipresent
flicker, encouraging one to focus and to seek information
of this light source. This requirement echoes the effect of
stained glass windows. The rose window of a religious house
specifically, works to create an ambience of heaven on
earth, underpinning the metaphor of God’s scrutinising eye
fixed on a worshipper whose eyes are fixed on him alike,
though in supplication. “The light of the body is the eye; if
therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full
of light” Mathew 6:22”
“I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I
don’t even see, not even discern. All that is necessary is
for something to signify to me that there maybe others
there. The window if it gets a bit dark and if I have
reasons for thinking that there is some one behind it, is
straightaway a gaze. For the moment this gaze exists, I am
already other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for
the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a
reciprocal one, others know that I am an object who knows
himself to be seen.” (Jacques Lacan, Book 1, “Freud’s Paper
on Technique”)
In this installation I
explore the locus of interface or the passage between the
virtual and real, and the potential for manipulation within
these modes of transfer. Paul Virilio discusses image
perceptions and their re-presentations through history: the
discovery of optical instruments and the use of light to
record/transcribe images for control and distortion within
the screen’s visual field. “One can only see
instantaneous sections seized by the Cyclops eye of the
lens. Vision once substantial, becomes
accidental.”2 Virilio’s commentary is
supported by Foucault’s notions on the mechanisms of
discipline and punishment inherent in the ‘docile body’; a
regime of panoptic surveillance. To evoke these
experiences, a ‘blind’ operates in paradox. Rather than
offering privacy to the space inside, it projects the
outside inwards. The screen has become a ‘vision machine’,
invading and scanning a private sphere.3
TO WHAT DO WE
‘SUBMIT’
and WHAT LIES BEYOND THE WINDOW
FRAME?
“Images cannot escape a rhetorical
bias. Selection, framing, size, value or colour balance all
direct the viewer to pay attention to something, implying
that other acts, objects or events are less important,
unimportant or even non-existent. Technology is not
neutral” (A
review on Computer and City as organised space, Visual
Language, Vol. 31, 1997 p.231.)
Our corporeal existence lodges recognised signs by which we
organise memory and knowledge. Guilo Camillo (1480-1544)
conceived a universal storage and retrieval system or
‘Memory Theatre’. He designed image codes of knowledge
types and positioned them alongside information bearing
caches spread fanwise through an auditorium. Visitors
accessed information by making reference to those coded
signs. Camillo believed it possible to reproduce each
imaginable micro and macrocosmic relationship within one’s
own memory by using visual clues and then combinations of
these to spark associated links (Peter Matussek, The
Renaissance of the Theatre of Memory). Camillo’s ambition
is now manifest by cyberspace which uses hyper-text to
explore links. And that exploratory premise is further
realised by our ability to navigate passages to a
destination using search engines. But cyberspace, unlike
the intimate immediacy of Camillo’s ‘Memory Theatre’, is an
exclusive, eclectic, reclusive, self-serving
medium.4
This installation
explores beyond the ‘window’. Operative constructs are
reflected in the military language and architecture
(Boot-up, Command, Delete, Submit) derived from systems of
power which control, survey and map our personal realms
when we ‘connect’.
The operation language has become transparent, and this
mutation next loses its origin by that shift in context and
is vulnerable to redefinition by new systems. Cyberspace
search engines ‘Netscape Navigator’ and ‘Explorer’ use
evocative icons which recall romance in exploration and
reflect Virilio’s description...
‘...the gaze of
the West ...once also the gaze of the ancient mariner
fleeing the non-refractive and non-directional surface of
geometry for the open sea, in quest of the unknown optical
surfaces, of the sight-vane environments of uneven
transparency, sea and sky apparently without
limits.’ (The
Vision Machine, pp.28-29 ).
MEMORY
SIMULATORS
“The density of events over the last
few decades threatens to rob all
meaning”.5
Mutated by new memory
mechanisms, information is presented at accelerated pace,
distorting our perception of time and of space. By
preferring to live in the ‘now’ contemporary westerners
relegate information about the past to inferior levels.
This reduced status is underpinned by accelerated ‘news’
deliveries which force recipients to ignore the neglected
or ‘superfluous’. Having demoted the value of our past we
naturally rescind an interest with the result that agreed
history is stored then abandoned as de-contextualised
caches in cyberspace. PC technology now possesses power
beyond its original design which was to purvey amongst
ourselves our quotidian informations. Presented to us in a
relatively homogenous setting are materials of fiction and
non-fiction. Foucault notes in a statement about image
recording “as
effective means ...of reprogramming popular memory
...people are shown not what they were but what they must
remember having been ...Since memory is a very important
factor in struggle ...if one control’s people’s memory, one
controls their dynamism.”6 Set in traffic with a density of events,
collective and personal memories can be warped by
manipulated transmission. Anton Kaes pinpoints concern in
his study “West German film making - from Hitler to Heimat:
The Return of History as Film”; “A memory preserved in filmed images
does not vanish, but the sheer mass of historical images
transmitted by today’s media weakens the link between
public memory and personal experience.
The past is in danger of
becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images, easily
retrievable but isolated from time and space, available in
an eternal present by pushing a button on the remote
control. History thus, returns forever - as
film.”7
Within this
installation video footage is designed to invoke a platform
of religious belief. That is, viewers may adopt confidence
in a higher order to see a passage/pattern through the
chaos. The videos are edited then looped to absorb the
viewer. “When you stare at
the Gorgon, the sparkle in her eyes dispossesses you, makes
you lose your own sight, condemns you to
immobility”. (J-P. Vernant, “La
Mort dan Les Yeux” sited in Virilio, “The Vision Machine”,
p.41). But repetition does not offer disclosure. The
juxtaposition of sight with sound confuses the viewers
sense of ‘real time’ footage and implies that a source of
sound/action lies beyond the screen. This is an exploration
into paradoxical logic, where a real-time image dominates a
re-presented image “...real time
subsequently prevailing over real space, virtuality
dominating actuality and turning the very concept of
reality on its head”. Sound and image
recordings re-presented through video footage
present “a paradoxical
presence, the long distance tele-presence of the object
which provides their very existence here and
now”.8
SITES/SIGHTS -
LOCATION & NAVIGATION - FROM MIND TO
MATTER
Presence by proxy is the acceptable
normal in contemporary culture. Distinctions have broken
down between knowledge given directly versus that received
through a third party, and one’s actual proximity to real
events seems unimportant as technology sweeps before it,
landmarks in the common ‘real’. Memory gives coherency to
one’s origin and arrival. Early lapidary monuments initiate
a split between mind and objects which operate as external
devices for denoting one’s place in time. The shift between
referencing external rather than internal signifiers
creates fracture. Walking in the mountains I am comforted
by the sight/site of these stacks. I know I am on route and
can let my mind wander. I ‘dislocate’, understanding that
these marks navigate a passage to shelter, absolving me of
responsibility for tracking my own physical progress
through the land. But the price of disburdening
responsibility is an internal memory vacuum, increasing
exponentially with use of the virtual world.
“This will
be a city uprooted to any definite spot of the surface of
the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints
rather than by accessibility and land values, largely
asynchronous in its operations, and inhabited by
disembodied and fragmented subjects who exist as
collections of aliases and agents. Its places will be
constructed virtually by software instead of physically
from stones and timbers, and they will be connected by
logical linkages rather than by doors, passageways and
streets”.9
MANIFESTATIONS OF
INSTALLATION
In this emersive series
I explore conduits of memory which transmit information
through altered states and disintegrating surfaces. These
interfaces communicate periods, locations and bodily
presence. The objects and electronic components - were
intercepted on course for the dump. Now altered, the
artifacts evoke reflection and reverence while vibrating
among marks that signify replacement and redundancy. These
objects - literally and metaphorically - capture, store and
recall information. They are activated in space and
reconfigured with video, lighting and movement to challenge
their commonly accepted functions. I am interested in
discussing ideas around the fetish, in both the collection
of information and their redundant reliquaries. The
response to an article in the Otago Daily Times is
significant to the aesthetics and construction of portions
in the installation. In this article the reporter describes
an IT collection of over 1300 items which is
‘rusting
away’ in the damp, draughty
storage area of the Otago Settlers’ Museum while the
collection’s guardians urgently seek funding to create and
maintain an ‘ideal
environment’ for these awkward
monsters. (Otago Daily Times,
April 16, 2002)
Parts of this installation bear a sense of the human
predilection to classify, thus deferring information
overload by lightening burdens to memory. With editing and
reconstruction the objects have been made to loosen their
ties to context and the world to which they have been
‘re-collected’. This work leads to further explorations of
artificia memoria through early mediums - print for example
- and those mediums which are evolving still. Recently we
are enabled by GPS units to orientate ourselves, with
regard to global agreement, exactly.
The installation ‘passages’ invite a precipitous view from
the corridor with an option to enter each cell or cache.
The viewer is challenged to negotiate the surface of the
matrix beneath and around their feet. The vacuous space of
the first cell provokes disorientation. A light scans
stained walls and mutant ‘wallpaper’. The second cell
manifests response to the first cell by bearing a sense of
order. As the information matrix of bit streams fracture,
fissures appear and the second cell begins to echo to the
viewer, the obsessive legacy and discomforting experiences
of the first. The installation endeavours to create a sense
of vertigo undermining the orderly archive, questioning
both access and excess of re-collection within.
References:
1. Quote from
Peter Matussek - The Renaissance of the Theatre of Memory.
website: http://141.20.150.19/pm/Pub/Kul/The_Rena.html,
sited 9/4/02
2. Paul Virilio, “The Vision Machine”, Indiana University
Press, 1994, p.13
3. Paul Virilio, “The Vision Machine”. p.64. Discusses the
Motivac, a new device for measuring Television audiences -
not unlike the black box of an aircraft.
4. Albert Borgmann, “Holding onto Reality”, Chicago Press,
1999, pp.175-176
5. Marc Auge, (translated by John Howe), "Non-places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity" Verso,
London & New York, 1995.pp.28-32
6. Foucault and Kaes sited in
Anne Friedberg, “Window Shopping: Cinema and the
Postmodern”, University of California Press, 199. pp.8-9
7. Foucault and Kaes sited in Anne Friedberg, “Window
Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern” pp.8-9
8. Paul Virilio, “The Vision Machine”, Indiana University
Press, 1994, pp.62-65
9. William J. Mitchell, 'City of Bits: Space, Place and the
Infobahn', Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Paul Virilio,
The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis,
1994.
J. Brook & Iain Boal (eds), Resisting the Virtual; The
Culture and Politics of Information - a book of essays,
City Lights, San Francisco, 1995. (screen savers, education
etc)
Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New
Technoculture, Fourth Estate, London 1997
Albert Borgmann, Holding onto Reality, University of
Chicago Press, 1999
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air, University of
Chicago Press, 1999
Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, Cambridge University
Press, U.K., 2000
Marc Auge, Non-Places; Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, Verso, London & N.Y., 1995
Hal Foster (ed), Vision and Visuality, essays including;
Rosalind Krauss (The Im/Pulse to See), Bay Press, Seattle,
1988
Alex Warwick, Bodies of Glass sited in Desire by Design;
Body, Territories and New Technology, The Womens Research
Group, London, New york, 1999
Susan Stewart, On Longing; Narratives of the minature, the
gigantic, the souvenir and the collection, Duke University
Press, 1993 (for references to the collector - in
particular)
Painton Cowen, Rose Windows, Chronical Books, San
Francisco, 1979
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping; Cinema and the Postmodern,
University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1993.
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant Garde and
Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, USA, 1986
Peter Matussek - The Renaissance of the Theatre of Memory.
website: http://141.20.150.19/pm/Pub/Kul/The_Rena.html,
sited 9/4/02
A. R. Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close
of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press Chicago, 1995
Tim Jordan, Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of
Cyberspace and the Internet, Routledge, London 1999
Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Double
Day, London, 1999
Peter Lunenfield, Snap to the Grid, MIT Press,
Massachusetts, 2000.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of
the Prison, Penguin, London, 1977 pp.149-155
Florian Brody, The Medium is the Memory an essay from The
Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media Edited by Peter
Lunenfeld. MIT Press, Massachuetts, 1999.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, 1941.
http://jubal.westnet.com.hyperdiscordia/library (sited 5
Sept 2002)
John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers; from
Structuralism to Postmodernism, Routledge, London, 1994