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Z33 House of Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium, has just opened an exhibition with a very promising title. Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. I'm going to visit it on Thursday but in the meantime i thought i'd ask one of the participating artists, Jill Magid, to tell us about the work she is showing at Z33 and more generally about her experience with impersonal power structures (police, intelligence agencies, security systems, etc.) which, whether they contribute to it or fight it, are part of this 'architecture of fear.' One of Magid's most ironic works is System Azure. In 2003, the artist introduced herself to the Amsterdam Police as a "Security Ornamentation Professional" working for a fictitious company. Magid's proposal to embellish police cameras was accepted and she was hired to hand-glued rhinestones to security cameras at the Amsterdam Headquarters of Police, a work that had previously been rejected when she had first presented it as an art project.
In Evidence Locker, Magid developed a personal relationship with the operators of Liverpool's citywide video surveillance cameras. Dressed in red, she had them follow her every steps as she moved across the city. Back in New York, she managed to gain the trust of a police officer and infiltrate his professional (and personal) world. Magid pushed even further her enquiries into the personality of the human beings hidden behind the faceless instruments of power and surveillance in 2005, when she met with employees of the Dutch secret service, the AIVD, and almost turned into an agent herself for a commission by the AIVD itself to create an artwork that would help them improve upon their public persona and provide them 'with a human face'.
The work Magid is showing at Z33 this Fall, A Reasonable Man in a Box, was inspired by the "Bybee Memo", a 2002 document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. The document considered the use of mental and physical torment and stated that acts widely regarded as torture might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of Presidential authority during the "War on Terror." The memos were declassified by President Obama in 2009. One of the acceptable methods of "enhanced interrogation" described in the document involved the use of a confinement box. The prisoner would be confined inside this box with insects which would not harm them. The people in charge would know that the insect or the animal is innocuous but would leave the prisoner in the dark about it. Magid's take on the interrogation technique is a room where the silhouette of a big hissing scorpion is projected wall. Every once and a while a pair of tweezers appears on screen to catch the animal by the tail. Hi Jill! I''ve been following and admiring your work ever since i started blogging. So far i associated you with performative works in which you put yourself on the front line (Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, Lobby 7 or Evidence Locker for example.) There's no visible trace of you in "A Reasonable Man in a Box". How do you decide whether you are going to be so visibly involved and present in a new work or when you are going to step back? The Spy Project-- in which I am the main protagonist, finished just before I began the research that led to A Reasonable Man in a Box. The Spy Project involved the censorship of my novel by the Dutch secret service about my experience working with it. This redacted manuscript got me to thinking about other government-censored documents. Simultaneously I was researching torture as it is used by democracies, and how these practices are hidden from public view or scrutiny. Both paths led me to the Bybee Memo. As the document was already complete and therefore no longer open to change, I did not feel I could not enter into it as a protagonist. I found a different way to engage it.
I saw images and read descriptions of the installation at the Whitney Museum. The room where the film was screened seemed to be spacious, with a visible entrance/exit. From what i gathered it still made quite an impact on visitors. But why didn't you chose to take a more extreme road and show the video in a claustrophobic space or in one that looked more like a cell or in a room you couldn't exit until the end of the video? I was not trying to make the viewer the tortured victim inside the box (i.e. gallery); rather, I wanted the viewer to consider the fundamental questions at the heart of the memo: what is reasonable; and what is a reasonable man in a box? The install is creepy, uncomfortable, and simple. The gallery becomes a shadow box: the shadow of the scorpion in the gallery is proportional to 'the stinging insect' in a confinement box. The shadow, as projected in both the Whitney and at Z33, is larger than life, as the rooms in which they are installed are of course bigger than a confinement box, which is only the size of a person sitting or standing. The fragment of the Bybee Memo discussing the enhanced interrogation practice of placing a man in a box with a stinging insect is also enlarged to scale. This enlargement is a kind of highlighting. Through it, the language has been made physical, enterable. Under these conditions, the memo and the questions it provokes can be examined and experienced on a personal level. The installation was inspired by the "Bybee Memo". I had never heard of it before. In Europe we are familiar with stories about the kind of music played to drive prisoners crazy, rendition flights (which couldn't have been carried out without the complicity of European governments anyway), etc. But i think that the "Bybee Memo" is less well-know here. Is that the same in the USA? Did the installation play with something that the audience was familiar with or did it reveal the existence of that "Bybee Memo" as well? There seem to be varying degrees of awareness about The Torture Memos (the common name for the Bybee memos), and the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation program. (Most notably in the press was the detailed practice of waterboarding, a type of enhanced interrogation practiced that simulates drowning.) Regardless, I felt 1. That it was an important document to (re)consider, and 2. That the installation was self-contained and therefore, did not rest upon a prior knowledge. The practice of placing a man in a confinement box with an insect was detailed in the Bybee Memo that was released in 2009 when President Obama came to office. I'd heard of the memo before working on this project, but I'd never actually read it (It's 18 pages of legalese). I have not yet met more than a few people who have. When I in fact did read it, I was shocked-- more by its language and (absurdist) 'empirical' logic than even by the practices it invoked and legalized. I'm interested in things that appear to be obvious or known, but aren't. I wanted to slow down the memo, focus and enlarge it, so that I could really look at it. The Bybee memo successfully changed the definition of torture in the United States for half a year, making acts that under the Geneva Convention were considered torture, legal.
A Reasonable Man is one of a series of projects that deal with secret services. In previous works you explored the Dutch secret service and engaged with a number of intimate relationships with members of the AIVD. The purpose of these meetings was "to collect personal data of the agents and to use this information to find the organization's face." So how were these people like? Is secret service all James Bond, exciting adventures and fearless clean-shaved men? What I find most intriguing about my engagements with government institutions is that in entering them I find that they are far more fantastic than I could have imagined, and rarely resemble what I have seen in films. I never cease to be surprised as to what I find and what I cannot find, and how both of these things affect me. The people I have engaged with are as varied and complex inside the service as they are outside of it.
While working on A Reasonable Man, how much information did you manage to find about the "enhanced interrogation" of high-level Al Qaeda operatives? Did you contact anyone? Meet? Found other pieces of information? How close did you manage to get to the issue? I focused on the memo and understanding it. I was also interested in the memo as to what was visible and what was missing due to redaction, and how my understanding of the former was influenced by the latter. The idea of the shadow-- of not being able to see the real but only its ghost, had much to do with this schism of visible/hidden. When I had questions about the memo, I did have some people to turn to. I was in contact with an investigative reporter (who has both a military and intelligence background) that had been embedded with the US army in both Iraq and Afghanistan and had visited Abu Ghraib (He is a protagonist in my current project), and a PhD student at NYU studying torture, law and the media. I also read about torture and democracy in books and in the news. These contacts and this research helped me approach and re-approach the memo with a continually deeper understanding. Are secret services a theme you're going to keep on exploring? I never know where the work is going from project to project, as my process is organic. That being said, secret services will no doubt continue to interest me. They epitomize many of my interests (secrecy, intimacy, power, legal and coded language), and they are inexhaustible. I still find myself drawn to any story on intelligence matters in the paper. I'm still a little hurt the CIA has never contacted me; )
I'm curious about something else... What happened to the rhinestone-studded surveillance cameras you installed in Amsterdam? They are still there, in full glamour (perhaps with a little city dirt and grime) on the headquarters of the police in Amsterdam. Check them out. They're permanent. Thanks Jill! Architecture of Fear remains open at Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium through December 31, 2011. |
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Quick one from STRP, the festival of art and technology which is taking place right now in Eindhoven, NL.
One of the installations that made me keep coming back to it over and over again last night is the Physiognomic Scrutinizer by Marnix de Nijs who, as usual, is using humour to reflect on some of the key issues of our society. In this case, the role biometric systems play in present our public space. The visitor is invited to walk through a brightly lit security gate similar to the ones you can find at airports, football stadiums and other protected public spaces. A camera takes a picture of their face and projects it on a LCD monitor behind the gate. A biometric video analyzing software scrutinizes the face but rather than try and identify the person, the software probes for facial features and characteristics that are similar to one of the 250 persons in the data base: each and everyone of them has gained fame for controversial or infamous acts (there are notorious transgender people, torturers, serial killers, pop stars addicted to drugs, etc.) Based on what the software detects, the visitor passing through the entry point will be accused according to the disrepute of their match and a stern, cold voice will enumerate their past deeds and misdeeds for everybody around to hear. The faces of the visitor and of the famous person are then displayed side by side on the LCD monitors behind the gate.
The tile of the work refers to physiognomy, the skill of interpreting a person's personality from looking at their external features and in particular the face. Ancient Greek philosophers recognized the validity of the study but it met with more disrepute in the Middle Ages and fell from favour over time. However, recent studies are now claiming that people's faces can indicate such traits as trustworthiness, social dominance and aggression. Face-recognition software is mainly developed for surveillance and security applications and commonly referred to as "biometric systems". The person undergoing the recognition process usually feels uncomfortable, even if he or she is innocent. Spectators of this security gate process never fail to have a good laugh to their friend who has just been paralleled with the world record gangbang holder or with Paris Hilton.
The STRP festival is open until November 28, 2010 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. |
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Remember that Tuesday post? I was sending you to London on a mission to visit Constructing Realities, an exhibition that showcases the best work from the Postgraduate Certificate Course in Advanced Architectural Research, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. I also promised i'd come back with more projects from the show.
This one is, imho, equally as fascinating as The Fortress of Senses but it is also strikingly different. Subverting the LiDAR Landscape: Tactics of spatial redefinition for a digitally empowered population is a speculative project which questions the way we interact with digital and physical versions of our cities. The project is based around LiDAR technology - 3D scanning but on a city scale. Google Earth and Streetview have now become people's most trusted tool for exploring and researching urban space. Moreover, the tools are now taken as virtual fact by a global internet population. They will soon be replaced by intricate 3D modeled versions of our cities derived from mobile 3D scanning units - LiDAR equipped vehicles. Matthew Shaw's project aims to subvert this mapping, by arming the population with the tools to edit the way their city is scanned and recorded. These tools are not digital hacks but physical interventions. They manipulate the scanning process and act as waypoints and markers linking the physical world to the digital.
I'm leaving you with Matthew's description of the project:
The Surveillance series are drawings that explore the city from stealth locations. They see what a LiDAR unit sees, what through wall radar can sense, what an IRA bomber may have thought, what AL-Qaida may be watching. They hide, see through walls, bend light and look round corners.
The Scan series are hybrid landscapes of real and imagined LiDAR data. They take actual 3D scans of the parliament area of London and breed them with speculative LiDAR blooms, blockages, holes and drains. These are the result of strategically deployed devices which offset, copy, paste, erase and tangle LiDAR data around them. They show the route of stealth drills carving LiDAR data in the public redecoration zone. They show boundary miscommunication devices - hotspots of spatial truths and mistruths. They show the deployment of flash architecture and toolpaths of stealth mechanics. Parliament is offset to St. James Park; protestors shelter under a LiDAR shield on the Mall, an urban transplant replaces Downing Street with an insurgent gateway and a Huas-MattaClarkian vista.
A series of prototypical objects explore the form and materiality of stealth and subversion. Each object starts life as an intuitively carved wooden sketch. These then become 3D notebooks on which to design precise insertions and additions. The objects are then 3D scanned using a self built scanner to enable precision inserts to be machined and added to the originals. These objects are then scanned and their digital siblings cast and machined from the scanned data.
The Surface Error series compounds the slight errors implicit in the scanning process and shows the distortion, mistruth and beauty that repeated error can create. A base SLS printed target is repeatedly scanned, 3D printed and re-scanned for 12 iterations. This micro test of distortion could be applied on a city scale, altering its digital appearance .
The Parliament series is made of subverted terrestrial laser scans and their respective tools, tool paths and deployment diagrams. Scans taken in Westminster, London between 7:23pm on June 3 and 11.56pm on June 17 showing pointcloud data collected near the Houses of Parliament. The facade of Parliament is visible in a swarming clouds of scanned noise and subverted data. These mistruths are engineered through a series of strategically placed disruptive objects positioned in the scan path.
--- For further information please contact matthew.shaw at ucl.ac.uk. Thanks Matthew! The exhibition Constructing Realities runs until October, 1st at PHASE 2 Gallery, 8 Fitzroy St, London W1T 4BJ (map.) Related: Book Review: Digital Architecture - Passages Through Hinterlands. |
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While in Montreal i saw a wonderful video by Laurent Grasso at the Galerie de l"UQAM. The film was part of a group exhibition, Nomos et Physis, in which four artists explore the various types of relationships we might have with political institutions. The title refers to the Greek debate on the bonds that tie two antagonistic forces: Law and order (Nomos) on the one side and Nature (Physis) on the other. Grasso's movie, shot in 2009 in The United Arab Emirates, looks at traditional hawk hunting. Except that the hawk gets equipped with light and sophisticated surveillance equipment. Once let to roam free above the land, the bird becomes a spying tool constantly tracked by its owner. The camera records every dune and village the hawk flies over. The images are fascinating but they are also threatening. Who is the man tracking the bird with an antenna? What is he trying to uncover? The movie and its paranoia-inducing music reminds us that a technique to use pigeons for aerial photography of enemy lines during wars was developed as early as 1907. The practice might not have vanished completely. Two years ago, articles reported that Iranian security forces had captured a pair of "spy pigeons," not far from one of the country's nuclear processing plants.
Nomos et Physis until June 5, 2010 at the Galerie de l"UQAM in Montreal. Previously by Laurent Grasso: Haarp at the GAKONA exhibition in Paris. |
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Last post about BIP2010, the 7th International Biennial of photography and Visual Arts in Liège. There's much more i would like to write about but given the appalling high amount of reports and reviews i still have to blog, it is probably wiser to stop the flow here and let your discover the rest of the biennale for yourself if you happen to be in Liège in April. Previously: BIP 2010 - Equilibrium and Accident and BIP 2010 - Out of Control, Berlin. The BIP2010 biennale is distributed into several location in the city of Liege, each venue focusing on a different aspect of the general theme: Out of Control. The Theater of Authority was the exhibition i liked the best. Not only because of the artists i discovered there but also because of the magnificently decrepit state of the building that hosts it. Europe has long been converting ex-warehouses and other industrial spaces into glorious cultural venues but never before had i witnessed such a stylish shabbiness.
I might sound ironic but i was truly charmed by the place. Now how about the show itself? Its premise will sound familiar to most readers: The Theater of Authority explores how our perception is mediated by and eventually adapts to the images coming from inquisitive medias such as satellites and security cameras. Everywhere around us, screens are showering our retina with information most of us hardly ever take the trouble to cross check. We tend to forget that these images are not first-hand, they are mediated, selected and distributed by media, political or scientific authorities.
Whether we like it or not, we are not only the resigned receptors of those images, we are actors as well. The anonymous gaze of surveillance devices, now ubiquitous in urban spaces, is following our every step. The photos shown in the exhibition Theater of Authority raise a number of pertinent questions: What happens when we confront this "authority of the visible"? When we push it to its limits? Or when we use and misuse it? Claudio Hils' stunning photo series documents a ghost town located in Senne, North Rhein-Westphalia (DE). Until recently, Senne was a British training ground for military emergencies. Everything about the place is fake, especially the targets in the shape of human beings wearing old fashioned clothes. Meant to enliven the city, the mannequins have the effect of highlighting its emptiness and bleak atmosphere. What is real though are the traces of military activity. Holes in facades, damaged targets, cartridge cases on the floor, etc. The series is called "Red Land - Blue Land", a code for maneuvers, Red Land stands indeed for enemy, Blue Land for friendly territory. Claudio Hils has chosen a documentary, factual approach which leaves the viewers with the task of building up their own scenarios and explanations.
Ange Leccia's Arrangement Stasi is made of two original East German closed-circuit surveillance camera units which he acquired from the Ministry for State Security. The lenses of the camera are barely a meter apart, they overlook each other so that the only thing visible within each camera's field of vision is the lens of its twin. Meanwhile, a pair of monitors screens the pictures registered by each of them. The installation remind us that one of the problem faced by the STASI bureaucracy was the difficulty to process the absurdly overwhelming amount of data its structure was collecting. Similarly, one can wonder whether there really is any attentive gaze behind the cameras that are monitoring our behaviour in public space.
In her work, Lucinda Devlin explores how architectural spaces express the values of the culture that creates and uses them. Between 1991 and 1998, Devlin traveled through some 20 states to photograph in penitentiaries, with the cooperation of the local authorities. The Omega Suites series -an allusion to the final letter of the Greek alphabet as a metaphor for the finality of execution- portrays execution chambers, holding cells, viewing rooms and other spaces associated with the act of institutionalized killing. With over 3000 inmates on death row and a large majority of US citizens supporting the death penalty, the almost clinical images bring to light one of the most disquieting ethical questions facing contemporary Americans.
November 13 1993. Philippe Meste attacks with his ludicrously tiny "War boat" the military harbor in Toulon. The rockets he crafted in his artist studio manage to damage the aircraft carrier Foch and other military ships anchored in the harbour. The artist's boat is seized by the police and returned only five years later. Meste's actions are motivated less by a urge to criticize the army than by a desire to test the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable, in the name of art. At first sight, his attack seems to be pathetic but i also reawakens our fear of insecurity and violence in the middle of an otherwise quiet Mediterranean city. The means and arsenal of war are, after all, ready to be activated should any agitation more threatening than Meste's emerge.
Paul Seawright's Hidden is a photo response to the war in Afghanistan in 2002. The minefields and battle sites in the images are eerily tranquil and composed. They nevertheless betray the presence of a violence that could be set in motion again.
"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" declares HAL in his dispassionate voice before taking full control of the ship's operations from the human crew. Simon Norfolk borrows the quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey to name a series of photos portraying some of the supercomputers working in silent locations around the world. The ultra powerful machines administer internet connections, decode human genome, calculate the physical phenomena taking place inside a nuclear warhead when it explodes, etc. Technology at its most fascinating and frightening. Like HAL, the supercomputers were designed to assist humans but they are also unable to sympathize with our logic and dilemmas.
A BOMB - Beauty of Destruction is a stunning collection of rare and original images compiled by Galerie Daniel Blau in Munich. The photos record nuclear tests performed in the '50s and '60s in Nevada and in the Pacific Ocean, explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of them are press impressions, other come from the military, the rest were used for research. The images of atomic explosions are as beautiful as the horror they represent. They are the ultimate theater of authority.
BIP2010, the 7th International Biennial of photography and Visual Arts in Liège, is open until April 25, 2010. |
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The Pixelache Helsinki festival which closed on Sunday had programmed plenty of exhibitions. My favourite was Anisotropics, a series of projects by Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran. Like everyone involved in media art, I knew of Ashok Sukumaran's work. In 2007 his project Park View Hotel was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Prix Ars Electronica. He went on to receive numerous other awards and has exhibited around the world. The Pixelache exhibition offered me the first opportunity to see several works by Anand and Sukumaran together in a same space. While looking at the videos and photo documentation of their projects side by side, i realized how remarkably consistent and intelligent their work is.
The exhibition title refers to anisotropy, the property of materials or mediums being direction-dependent. Crystals, wood and tendons for example are anisotropic, they show different strengths when pulled in different directions. Anand's and Sukumaran's work suggests that technology can follow paths different from the ones imposed by a purely capitalist perspective. When radio, electricity or CCTV is "pulled" in this way, it reveals a different set of properties, a vivid materiality and expanded parameters.
If i had to single out a work in the exhibition it would be (Al jaar qabla al dar) The Neighbour Before the House. This series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem, shot with a fixed security camera. The artists were sitting together with Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem as they commented the scenes captured by the camera. Some of them have had their house confiscated without much warning nor justification and they explain how happy they used to be in a house now occupied by settlers, others are quietly pointing out the changes that the topography of the city had to undergo over the past few years. The resulting video which was screened inside the gallery is a bit raw but it is also the most moving film i've seen recently. The idea behind the project is simple but the effect goes far beyond anything you could expect. Camera pans, zooms and live commentary become ways in which Palestinian residents reach out to what can be seen from their homes, and speak about the nature of their distance from others. (a project by CAMP). The Neighbour Before the House is not the artists' first foray into the surveillance systems. A few years ago already, Shaina Anand's project KhirkeeYaan put security devices at the disposal of the audience, allowing them to interact with each other.
I caught up with Ashok and asked him a couple of questions about (Al jaar qabla al dar) The neighbour before the house: Turning the surveillance camera on the one who are usually the one responsible for the surveillance is a very strong idea. Did you have to buy a new camera? or did you manage to get your hands on a model similar or identical to the one used by the Israeli? The turning around of the surveillance system is a starting point, for the project. It is something that, in Shaina's work in expanded film and in CAMP's visual projects more generally... is a given. I.e. that there are going to be many different ways to produce and retrieve moving images. The "general economy" of images is then a much larger and more interesting area than just auteur film, or commercial film, or art, etc. When we enter this space, we are: a) working with standard equipment, that is not only "repurposed" but that reveals the dynamics and intentions of the system, and what drives its "use". This is a much more interesting interpretation of something than the word "hacking" implies. So in these cctv cameras, we can sense how the design of the pan/ tilt system, and the extreme zooms (250x) are integral to its imagined function. The camera used is a standard dome pan/ tilt camera, used generically around the world. It doesn't matter so much where it came from, it is quite everyday and universal. It is used routinely, in many airports, etc. It costs about 400 dollars, about the same as a consumer handycam. In the 2nd episode in jaar, there is a scene where the speaker points to a camera set up by the Isrealis in a street, that a guy on a bike had pulled of the wall. This camera isn't that one, just to be clear :)
How easy was it for you to go back and forth between east Jerusalem and the rest of the city? We were staying in East Jerusalem, and the work was part of the Jerusalem Show, held in the Christian quarter and in other places, curated by Jack Persekian and Nina Montmann. We never actually engaged with west Jerusalem. Moving around was not so difficult. We were stopped a couple of times, but that was it. And we weren't doing anything really, just moving equipment around. Things are different every week, of course, and these past few weeks have been quite tense in Al Quds. How did you select the people who commented on the images you shot? was there a strategy? people living at a certain distance of a separation wall for example? The people were found in different ways. They did not comment on the images afterwards, it happened in sync with the shooting... i.e. the speaker was also manipulating the camera. Which is why you get this strange asynchronicity. The story is looking for an image, an image giving rise to a story. There were some people close to the wall obviously, since the wall is everywhere. But one of the more poignant ones is where people are talking about their own house.. i.e. the house they lived in for decades, before they were evicted a few months ago, this is in Sheikh Jarrah.
The webpage of the project says "The project is ongoing." Do you have plan to work further on it? to develop it in other directions? Yes, the project is being developed as a larger project. But we will keep publishing it in various ways. The videos you saw are one way. The other form this takes is raw footage on pad.ma: You can download and reuse this material. You can even mark in and out and download parts of it (go to actions/ download this selection) And of course you can write your own commentary. Thanks Ashok! Anisotropics is part of the Signals from the South, an annual showcase of projects from 'the South' (South America, Africa, Asia) consisting of an exhibition and a seminar. If you happen to be in Beirut next month, don't miss Don't Wait for the Archive. Archiving practices and futures of the image, a workshop and colloquium with pad.ma. The event takes place on Sunday, April 25th at Home Works, Beirut. |
