Jordan Crandall's biography

Jordan Crandall (USA) will present the ideas behind two of his video projects - 'Drive' and 'Heatseeking'. Both projects combine traditional cinematic technology with military-derived imaging systems. These include night vision cameras; Infrared thermal imaging systems; surveillance cameras; motion tracking systems; and miniaturized, stealth cameras that are directly concealed on the body. Combining old and new, analog and network, civilian and military, his work moves toward a post-cinematic language - one that has specific historical and political resonances. These resonances are urgent during this highly volatile historical moment, when the rapid pace of military development threatens to exceed our ability for comprehension and debate.
In addition to the militarized strategic seeing and top-down apparatus of control that these technologies constitute, Crandall is also interested in the new kinds of exhibitionistic impulses and erotically-charged social dynamics that they introduce. He will discuss the ways that these impulses are bound up in new processes of identification, integration, and incorporation as sources of erotic pleasure. These involve new couplings of humans and machines; new senses of intimacy and invasive pleasures that usurp private space; and new forms of simultaneously seeing and being seen - which are helping to change the contours of the body, its desires, and is sense of orientation in the world.
jordancrandall.com

Crandall is also editor and organizer of Blast. In addition to a discussion of his video projects, he will discuss critical issues raised in the Blast online forums, particularly the <eyebeam><blast> online forum of 1998, released this year in book form. The topics of this forum include the new kinds of cultural identifications that are facilitated by the Internet; the relationship between art and activism and the new kinds of action that the net enables; the poetics of online communication; the intersections of technology, body, and code; the relevance of the museum and the new types of institutions that are needed in this new landscape; the relations between bodies, information systems, and urban realities. What emerges in an unequivocal assertion of the relevance of artistic practices at this moment in time, when new critical strategies need to be developed within market systems and the question of civil space must be situated across another private/public divide.

BIO
Jordan Crandall is an artist and media theorist. Crandall has written on technology and culture for a variety of media. He lectures widely on the cultural and political dimensions of new technology. He has organized many online conferences, and he regularly serves as a visiting critic. Crandall is founding Editor of Blast: www.blast.org

Artist's Statement

Media, metaphor, memory:
addiction to testimony
Vera Frenkel's (CND) videotapes, websites, sound works and multidisciplinary installations explore the forces at work in human migration, displacement and deracination, the resultant learning and unlearning of cultural memory, and the bureaucratization of everyday life.

For the World Wide Video Festival Seminar, Frenkel will introduce aspects of 'The Institute: Or, what we do for love', her current work-in progress, a poly-valent video-web narrative on the travails of a large and dysfunctional cultural institution. Three of the artist's songs will be heard as commentary or descant during the presentation, sung in absentia by the group 'Mad Love' (sisters Audrey, Linda and Wanda van der Stoop, making their first symbolic return to Holland.) Parts of the work have appeared in various image-text-sound formats, all constituent elements in preparation of 'The Institute' website now in production. The website in turn will form the armature for a six part web-video series. Frenkel will present some of these elements and discuss their integration into the work now in production.

The artist will also briefly discuss and screen passages from a group of earlier works rooted in an interrogation of the abuses of power and their consequences:
- 'This is Your Messiah Speaking' (London, 1990), on the relation between messianic fantasy and consumerism.
- '"... from the transit Bar"' (Kassel, 1992), six-channel videodisc installation and functional piano bar, on issues of displacement and questions of identity and its loss.
- 'body Missing' (Linz, 1994), another multi-channel installation and its ongoing website extension tracing the relationship between so-called cargo-cult practices, collecting fever and the Kulturpolitik of the Third Reich, the study of which has prompted Frenkel's current work on everyday bureaucratic madness. www.yorku.ca/bodyMissing