Three Australian new media artworks exhibited in Sydney recently, each explore issues surrounding the contemporary image, focusing in particular on the politics of tracking, the poetics of digital imaging and the difficulties involved in visualizing the invisible.

The camera suicides

Of the many imaging technologies that surround us, surveillance cameras are a particularly insidious presence. These ubiquitous devices are continually recording our movements, each person effectively leaving a trail of personal data that they will most likely never see. Perhaps it’s my anxiety over the invisibility and inaccessibility of these recordings that made watching Denis Beaubois’ provocative video work The Terminal Vision Project (2007) such a cathartic experience.

In Terminal Vision, exhibited at the Performance Space, wireless camera technology is literally and figuratively turned on itself. In an anthropomorphic sense, the camera is made to suffer as it is hurled full tilt off the top of a tall building, all the while made to unwittingly broadcast its own unceremonious demise.

Inside the massive grey exhibition space at CarriageWorks, a row of five huge projections completely covers the length of one wall. Entering, I am immediately struck by the sound of throbbing white noise. The grungy video images flicker in and out of visibility, messy and unstable, their haphazard movements are repeatedly interrupted by interference and static. In a time of plasma screens and HD, these images appear to be something covert, they are too dirty and the signal far too weak to be anything but undercover, as if we are witnessing someone or something being caught in the act.

Through the grunge I make out a close-up of a wall with concrete cancer; wisps of the artist’s very recognisable dark hair quiver in shot. A windowsill appears and I glimpse a private room, a kitchen perhaps, covered in old linoleum. Then the image degrades, I loose visibility to static, colours bleed into each other and interference takes over. For some reason I begin thinking about a comic secret agent who can’t work his pinhole camera, and as if replying to this thought I hear a man’s muffled voice on what sounds like a walkie-talkie. Unexpectedly a finger probes the lens, repeatedly squashing the image away into flesh and darkness. Finally I make out the familiar shapes of Waterloo’s infamous ‘suicide towers’ and as the signal weakens again, I begin thinking; what a precarious position we’re in, up here on top.

Suddenly we’re falling and the sound changes to an intense humming drone. I think about an aeroplane crashing, the black box recorder and what traces remain when everything else is destroyed. Windows are spinning past and the horizon is in the wrong place. After a moment I start laughing, the dizzying image of the ground hurtling up towards me is hilarious and exhilarating to watch. I imagine how much fun it must have been to throw these little mechanical guineapigs off the edge, and then mid-thought, we hit the ground—thud—more static. A person walks by on a slant through the top of the skewed frame, unaware of our prone position in the grass, we are left for dead, then everything turns black – silence…

As audience members watching this defiant act on video we are presented with an unusual point of view, an angle and trajectory that we know will remain inaccessible to us, unless we decide to end it all and fling ourselves off the edge, but even then it is unlikely we would be around to remember what we saw, let alone record the experience. By broadcasting these impossible images, Beaubois allows us to embody the camera’s fatal mobility and participate vicariously in his rebellious act. In this sense the image is one of impossibility, a terminal vision.

data lives

Two artists who for some time have also been concerned with surveillance and more broadly the politics of tracking human data are Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski. Their concerns are once again raised in Seeker (2005), recently on show at Artspace.

Seeker is a conceptually rich and aesthetically striking piece that is immediately engaging on a number of levels. In its most recent incarnation it comprised three large video projections displayed on hefty angled screens. The central image consisted of an animated, interactive world map. Using a simple touch screen interface, visitors could enter their family migration history. This data is shown as a trail on the map and then re-visualised as a series of curves representing each family’s generational movement throughout the world.

The other two screens are more mysterious. On one, colourful vectorgraphic curves dance across the surface of beautiful, desolate landscapes. These animated abstractions describe the relationship between an assortment of statistical factors and variables, often as depressing statistics. What is “coltan” I wonder, to be included on a scale that reads “the Congo resource wars”, “3 million dead” and “3.5 million displaced…” and what is its connection with “every mobile phone” and “every computer”?

Glancing to the other screen I see aerial imagery of suburbia overlaid with a thin strip of fast moving, news bulletin-style text: “a man has frozen to death on a plane…on a boat three stowaways die…landmines kill Pakistani refugees…23 Pakistanis drown in river on way to Europe…”

This procession of death and despair seemed in marked contrast with the fun everyone was having inputting their family histories. I was reminded of how easily some of us can move in the world thanks to the luck of our birth, and the immense difficulty others face when attempting to escape places of unfathomable hardship and danger. However Starrs and Cmielewski’s background in creating humorous and entertaining artwork inspired by computer games still manages to seep through this conceptually solemn work.

The power of Seeker seems to derive mainly from its ability to stimulate intimate and often politically charged dialogue between gallery visitors. diagnostic mysteries Modern images are no longer simply representations; they are also dynamic, interactive processes that form an integral part of contemporary medicine, weaponry, communication, movement and politics.

diagnostic mysteries

Many of the images we see today are not discernible to our naked senses and we rely upon a range of scientific instruments for their continued visibility. Michelle Barker and Anna Munster explore this problematic in Struck (2005), recently shown at the Art Gallery of NSW, by taking viewers on an unsettling journey into the largely invisible world of neurological disease.

Through a disturbing array of black and white medical imagery Struck evokes an uncomfortable awareness of the body’s powerlessness in the face of debilitating illness, and explores the equally difficult experience of finding oneself under the probing eye of medical science that attempts to treat it. Watching this piece brought back memories of long hours spent in a hospital waiting room. It triggered powerful feelings of sadness and helplessness, emotions that were intensified by the work’s soundtrack—electronic noises, punctuated by the mournful notes of a piano and a childlike wailing.

Surrounded by three giant video projections, as inside a hospital I felt like a small, insignificant presence within a complex and confusing, technologically driven world. As in a waiting room, a strange sense of timelessness pervaded the in-between space of the gallery where the work was installed. My thoughts were drawn to the similarities between the art world’s sterile ‘white cube’ and the sanitised, often unwelcoming environment of contemporary medicine.

Struck immerses viewers in a disconcerting realm of medical traces and unfamiliar diagnoses, confronting us with lingering images that, like the nebulous shapes burnt in to your eyes after looking into a bright light, are not easily erased. The most recognisable image in Struck is the now familiar medical trope of the brain scan slice, a highly detailed form contrasted in the work with the blurred images of a naked woman. Who is this faceless figure, I kept wondering, so vulnerable yet resolute within this alien medical world? Occasionally text appears, sometimes distant and clinical, seemingly transcribed from doctor’s records, sometimes comprising poignant, personal anecdotes: “People tell you how well you look—it makes you feel worse”.

At certain points an antiquated, stop-frame animation appears of a writhing female figure made, I later read, from the drawings of Jean-Martin Charcot, the influential 19th century French neurologist. It is hard to believe that these clumsy images were once contemporary medical documents, and the idea that someone could be diagnosed using them sends shivers down my spine. On the other hand, I realise that while I am comforted by the scientific validity of the more sophisticated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) its images are still for the most part beyond my understanding, I cannot relate my thoughts or my feelings to their intricate electrical signals and I have no idea what they really mean.

Essentially this is the core issue of Struck, the increasing visibility of the material human body made available to us through scientific imaging and the problematic relationship these images have with our ongoing embodied experience.

Published in RealTime issue #78 April-May 2007 pg. 26