[-empyre-] still in shock and awe at media representations of the war...

[Teri Rueb <teri@echonyc.com>]

While I was busy obsessing over a post I intended to make over the 
weekend, my friend Brett laid the groundwork for me - thank you, 
Brett!

The clarification I made in my opening statement was that explicit 
critiques of the military origins and uses of GPS have remained at 
the margins of my practice - acknowledged, yet unexplored.  This has 
been a conscious decision for me as an artist.  I am absolutely 
committed to acknowledging and critiquing the military-industrial 
origins of the tools I use, and do so in the classroom and beyond all 
the time, but it is not the focus of my work in making installations 
and location-aware environments.  With this forum I tread eagerly, 
yet gingerly, in this discursive territory - especially in the 
current moment.

I firmly believe that "artists have a stake in the use, 
development,...[and] cultural manifestations of military derived 
technologies." (Brett)  Furthermore, I think artists working with 
technology have the unique potential to engage these discourses and 
practices as they extend beyond the immediate domain of art and 
cultural theory (through inter/trans disciplinary collaboration with 
scientists and engineers, interventions in the ubiquitous digitized 
spaces of the everyday, taking their work to market either ironically 
or otherwise, etc.).

In fact, I actually believe that delivering our work, or by-products 
of it, to market is an interesting and important way for artists to 
participate in shaping the future of 
technology/culture/consciousness.  If tools and consciousness are 
mutually constructed then I'd rather have tools made by critical 
thinkers than corporations.  Notable design practices have always 
done this, of course, but I find it interesting to see artists 
spilling over into this territory more and more as their work 
suggests broader applications.

Re: the neutrality of data, I am reminded of N. Katherine Hayles and 
am grateful for the many posts (especially Melinda's) that have 
forcefully acknowledged that information is, in fact, always embodied 
- despite Western history's undying fantasies of disembodied 
information.

In moving forward, I would like to reply to Brett's question, "What 
is it like to live with these technologies and our embedded-ness in 
them?"  Issues of landscape, narrative, and the aesthetic 
implications of GIS are deeply intertwined in the compelling and 
disturbing image of a CNN feed at the gas pump, offered by and 
adeptly un-packed by Brett.  The "battlefield weather reports" 
continue to offer illusions of mastery, control and omniscience.  The 
ultimate video game "fly-through".  As regular injections of the 
mytho-poeic, these images recall Icarus, the opening sequence of 
"Brazil"...others?

I can't help but return to the Crandall quote from Brett's prior post,

"Where the terrestrial image has an object, the aerial image has a 
target." (Anything that Moves: Armed Vision) "[T] he projectile-gaze 
captures its object, freezes it, holds it in a tracking mode, 
intercourses it, obliterates it, couches it in a mechanism of 
protection."

I wonder about the aerial image.  I wonder about the difference 
between the still aerial image and the moving aerial image.  The 
classic image of the earth as seen from the moon is one of 
narcissistic contemplation.  In beholding it, the viewer is suspended 
in limbo, unable to resolve the conflation of self and other evoked 
by the image.  The appearance of this image can be thought of as a 
sort of mirror stage in our geo-spatial awareness of our place in the 
cosmos as represented through camera vision.

In the case of the battlefield weather report, the "fly-through" 
perspective presents a moving aerial image where the viewer is 
ostensibly cast in the role of pilot.  If "the terrestrial image has 
an object, and the aerial image has a target," then the moving aerial 
image in the "battlefield fly through" would seem to have a second 
target - the moving target of the pilot as tracked by the subject of 
her gaze.   The disturbing overtone in watching these images is felt 
in the simultaneous sense of mastery, control and omniscience even 
while the viewer has the sense of being watched back - the gaze is 
returned.  The other is made present as a reflection of the self.

I know nothing about battlefield experiences, and mean no disrespect 
in attempting to theorize them here, but this new mode of "bringing 
the war home" (thanks, Martha Rosler) through the intersection of 
televisual media and GIS, strikes me as an especially chilling form 
of war as entertainment.

...would greatly appreciate any re-calibrations or fine tunings of 
this tentatively offered riff...

-Teri
--

.....http://www.research.umbc.edu/~rueb......