Drawing in the Media Stream: September 2 – 24th, 2008 Tony Allard/FOSSIL MEDIA
Rhizome, review by Katherin Sweetman Still Image Documentation: |
Project Statement The process of creating the drawings for this installation comes from our long standing critique of the compulsive production of images that are fed 24/7 into the global media stream, and the resultant loss of short and long term memory that this glut produces.While in the glare and glut of these images, we are compelled to question what an “image” is, and by extension, what is representation and realism, and how visual memories are now constructed. We ask ourselves the question: how can any meaningful representations and lasting memories be created from the extremely temporary representations produced by the 24/7 media stream. This installations is an attempt to negotiate the collision between traditional forms of perceptual drawing and visual memory making with what Paul Virilio has identified as techno culture’s headlong plunge into “visionics”, machine-based, sightless vision and image making. Visionics is techno culture’s new visuality, based completely on synthetic, machine-based vision, automated perception and contemplation. The drawings being created for this installation are not a rejection of the “industrialization” of vision, but rather, are hybridizations: creating drawings, representations, and visual memories from immediate personal perception and from the perceptions of the new super synthetic vision machines. With the invention of the printing press in the 14th century, and continuing through the birth of mass media machines during industrial revolution, and on up to the present digital age, machine-aided vision and machine-made images have profoundly transformed our notion of what an image is. Today, an image is no longer a static, analogue, one of a kind object with one point of reception, but rather, it is a dynamic, navigable, digital “file” that can be viewed simultaneously in thousands upon thousands of discrete points of reception around the globe. |
In essence, an image is no longer an object but an event, the meaning of which is not static, but is also dynamic, mutable, ever changing. Of necessity, the drawings being made for this installation do not claim the privileged position of object hood, but on the contrary, enter into a dialogue with the images flowing nonstop through the relativistic environment of the global media stream. The marks that make up a machine made image have also been dematerialized and have become an integral part of the global image/event/stream which is created and destroyed simultaneously. In the digital realm, marks are no longer discrete traces left behind on a stable surface, but rather, are infinitely mutable bits of data with no stable location in time or space. In the relativistic realm of a bitmapped or a vectorized image, marks and the surfaces they are presented on are more akin to the transitory light and shadows that make up the moving images of computer-based video and animation. The visible marks that momentarily coalesce on screen are part of a hyper ephemeral representation that never comes to rest in the comfort of our conventional senses of representation or realism. With the status of the image now being primarily event-based, its function in the formation of historical and personal memory has undergone a radical transformation as well. Virilio frankly points out that “visionics” has thrown serious doubt on the veracity of human vision, and the mental images we collect in our minds to form. It is in this tenuous but compelling space and time of doubt and questioning that we are now drawing and thus memorizing our way through the media stream. This installation is an attempt to draw in the liminal space and time between object and event. The “reality engine” that will power this installation is the 24/7 global media stream that flows in torrents of virtual and analogue images. |
Diekman and Allard Artists Talk TA: For you, what is the function of taking images out of their context in the media stream and disrupting their original meaning through the process of drawing. KD: I am trying to disturb our reading of a familiar image, and interrupt the process of signification. I think of what I am doing in drawing and video as magnifying the image, then refocusing it. Magnifying it makes it larger, and calls special attention to it in a form of overt recognition of what it represents. For instance, the ATT icon is an example of magnifying it through multiple instances of it in the show. Then it is refocused, breaking it away from what it represents towards something else. In this case, it has relationship to the Olympics as ATT was one of the major sponsors of the spectacle, appeared within the spectacle, and orchestrated Olympians achievement through the ATT sound track. So ATT is not just a telecommunications company, but also a national symbol, a force behind marketing our nations Olympics heroes, a world wide force. The man is running on a track, which is also the world, which is also the ATT icon. I am trying to take the unity of a media image, and expanding it to create commentary on politics, humor, irony, poetry. Redirect the image to multiple meanings. Drawing also is different than video, in that drawing adds another layer of removing the image from its original form. Drawing makes it less real, and so can give us some reflective distance from the original use of that image.
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TA: Describe the process of making the videos and how they relate to the show? KD: I emailed people I knew, and gave them simple instructions. I asked them to take 5 – 10 images with their cell phones of a media object, make some commentary in text, and send them to me. My job was to take these personal, somewhat esoteric still images and text, and create short videos using what the person had sent to me. I was interested in how people take pictures with their cell phones. In general, when cell phones first come out with picture taking possibilities, I saw a lot of people holding them up like so (towards themselves at arms length) and taking pictures of themselves. It was as if the world was no further away than arms length. Then I saw people using thier cell phones to take pictures of events. I always wondered what people did with those pictures—if they sent them, or saved them, or used them on their screens, or just deleted them. People don’t seem to share those pictures. I was interested in then taking these personal selections of the media world, and creating time based narratives with them. Making stories and relations of images in time. Most often, I did not have a clear sense of what the person was trying to convey, so it was up to me to make meaningful relationships between all of the images and the available text. Sometimes I had to do more research to find out about subjects in the image, and I added sound to some, and additional text to others. It was an experiment in distillation. To try to find the kernel of meaning in what was sent, and then to recompose it for a different viewer. I hope that out of that comes humor, questions, irony, emotion, critique. I think what I was doing was not drawing in the media stream, but trying to draw things out of the media stream.
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TA: Does memory play a role in your work? KD: Memory is an important component in much of my work. In my video work, I often use structures that ask the viewer to remember what came earlier in the work and how that changes over time, or how it creates additional meaning to later elements in the video. In this show, I am interested in memory on several levels. Marita Sturken is an author who has written extensively about the relationship of personal memory and cultural memory, and images work to create memory. She thinks that certain images can create a shared memory of an event, images such as some of the video from 911 or the image there of torture. Every person comes to that event with a personal memory, but that the image can also instigate a shared memory within a nation or culture. We are aware that through censorship, images can be tightly controlled as to what we are allowed to see, and therefore how we remember it. Censorship can be done through political manipulation, or it can be because something is too painful to show. For people of my generation, the Kennedy assassination was such an image. The amateur super 8 film of that event was suppressed for years, although still images were published. Yet people still talk about seeing it on TV when it happened, even though there were no live images broadcast. A video artist, Rea Tajiri, made a video about her mother’s internment in a Japanese prison camp here in the United States during WWII. Very few images exist from that time, because according to the video, cameras were not allowed in the camps. The videomaker’s mother has a certain level of trauma and forgetting because of her experience in the camps, which does not allow her to fully move on with her life. Her mother relates a memory to her daughter, the videomaker, about washing her face with cold water from a canteen. She doesn’t know where the image comes from, or why she remembers this. The videomaker re-enacts the image for her in order to help her remember, but also to help her move on away from the trauma.
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TA: Being primarily a video artist, how does drawing and video inform each other as artistic processes for you? KD: Drawing has often been an important part of my artistic process. It allows me a way to understand something a fresh or a new. It is very physical, so it requires me to use my body in a different way, which gives a different perspective on the issue that I am dealing with in the work. One of my videos for this show, “Milestone”, is based on images and text that I took from a newspaper about how we had reached a deadly milestone of 500 service people who had died in Operation Enduring Freedom, which encompasses the wars in Afghanistan, Philiphines, and other places. In the article, it related the story of a mother whose son was killed. After his death, she received an email from someone who had shot video of his death, and link to the video. In the article, she says that she watched it compulsively, to see “how it – the bullet—found him”. This is similar to what I was saying about Rea Tajiri’s video of her mother. Perhaps the image is healing for the mother, or perhaps it is not. Maybe through it compulsive repetition, it does not allow her to move forward beyond her trauma. The video I created used her text, and I shot images of those dead who were pictured in the article. I was trying to disturb the drift between sign and image, of what we see when we see full pages of head shots of service people who have died. Sometimes these people who are sisters, fathers, sons become abstract signs of loss rather than a particular person. By adding her text to these images, I hoped to at least raise that question if you were watching the video. I also did a drawing based on the same article. In the article, it had a graph showing years 2001 – 2008, with each bar representing 10 people. I thought to myself how impersonal this graph was, and what kind of culture represents people with black vertical bars? I was further struck by this when I saw the same kind of graphical representation of barrels oil and profit. So I decided to draw the graph of the dead by hand, filling in one bar at a time. It took a long time, but it created a reflective, meditative place, where I could create personal memory of loss that it wasn’t my own. So in this sense, my own memory is part of the show, too. |