dear all:
thank you for all these view points.
I became interested in the absence of sound (and the moving body) in the
discussion on screens and projective media
and now i see John Hutnyk has raised this issue very well. But some thoughts,
in your longer recent postings, perhaps can be looked at again,
I am grappling with them,
>>
In so many ways the city, and the border, is an audio-visual enclosure>>
I not sure where you locate "border" and what you mean by it? Are you
implying that the border crossings apparatus (and you don't mean airports, do
you?) is a scripted film? a media architecture
Is this the "media architecture" (now spatial location or design become
metaphor?) or script that Ricardo Dominguez seeks to disturb, using, i quote,
">>multiple orientations of sonification - you can scroll down and see visual
poems to be presented on the cellphones as one layer of the tools safety
protocols for those crossing the Mexico/U.S. border - another element of border
crossing sonification is part of the navigation>>
How would this practice of helping immigrants (illegal border crossers or
migrants? they all need to have cell phones, yes?) be connected to the "border
documents" John Hutnyk mentions, when he speaks of:
<<We are interested in new perspectives on the status and function of the
documentary forms today, as they cross the ontological divide between fiction
and truth, art and reality (objective/subjective, social, political, ethical
etc) and frame alternative ways of seeing, witnessing, representing, archiving
and experiencing 'the elements of truth' (Steyerl, 2003). Can we understand
documentation not as paper passports or mere representation but as docketing
the (re)construction of (new) social and political realities - we are
interested in time and screen formats that offer access to critical
recontextualization of the reproduction of borders, and of unfolding new agents
of social and political (ex)change. On a more formalistic note, how does the
documentary form carry a politic, an ethics or epistemology and how can the
documentary film help us see and act differently? Does the time of the border
transform its place, or its performative character? Does border activism lend
itself to the cinematic? Can we film another way across?>>
Can you tell us what you could possibly mean by "filming your way across"?
I think the theoretical language here, political as it sounds, operates in a
kind of Second Life. At the same time, the conflict issues you mention --
migration, racism (profiling, the war of terror, security hysteria) and capital
(economic restructuring, cultural economy etc) -- are of course very real, and
so are the prevention measures of your or my crossing some/certain borders
[e.g, i hear, at the moment, between Australia and the UK, such crossings
become diffiuclt regarding application for work visa).
Were you thinking of the potential "ubiquity" of "witnesses" to protest against
perceived injustice? as might have occurred during the recent unrest and
uprising in Iran, when the video of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan went onto
YouTube (in everyday parlance that now means "around the world") and then the
song ("Khas o khashak") appeared: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FPJNvKRy0E
I am not I see any connection between the video trailers on YouTube and the
claim:
>In that sense, transporting cinematographic practices to open spaces
disturbs both its particular architecture and the urban logic,
allowing the dismantling of the apparatus and its renegotiation in
more fluid forms.>
It would seem to be always the opposite, under capitalist / global
domination-diffusion systems, namely that the apparatus goes on, healthy and
strong, and panoptic and postpanoptic (I have seen term used lately, but what
would it refer t to -- the online dimension of I post you you post me the
nighbors post their cell phone video on youtube about what happens on their
streets and everyone soon gets access to the CCTV system anyway so we can
control one another?) systems perfect their mechanisms. Artists "negotiate"
the apparatus, yes. I have heard this said, and believed its idealism a little
bit, some time ago, and I also remember the border workshops of 20 years ago,
down on the California/Mexico border; they also negotiated, would you agree,
Ricardo. When you enter Texas, via the Río Bravo del Norte at night, there is
little for you to negotiate. The musique concrete might be gunshots, police
sirens, and dogs barking. A blinding light will be pointed at you.
with regards
Johannes
Johannes Birringer
director, DAP Lab
School of Arts
Brunel University
West London
UB8 3PH UK
+44 (0)1895 267 343 (office)
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
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