[-empyre-] FW: introduction [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

["Meziane, Tracey" <Tracey.Meziane@environment.gov.au>]

Forwarded message from Jill Magid
 

________________________________

From: Jill Magid [mailto:jill@jillmagid.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, 6 June 2007 9:45 AM
To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Cc: Meziane, Tracey
Subject: introduction


Hello everyone, 

I have not properly introduced my work so I would like to do that now. I
am including a short paragraph about my work 
below in quotes. Please excuse my sporadic my entries at the beginning
of our conversation, I have an exhibition coming up 
and am in the midst of preparations. 
I am interested in a topic that is quickly surfacing in all the entries
so far, 
about the real verses the virtual. As I believe Stacia mentioned, for
her these are both real experiences, with different qualities. 
I am torn on the issue myself, not as much about the virtual in terms a
digital media but the virtual as narrative or literary fiction. 
Most of my work comes from a lived experience- like Barbara said as
well, I use myself as a tool. Many of my projects involve my gaining 
permission to enter a system. This permission becomes a material of the
work. The relationships created within the system (generally 
one of authority) depends upon a creating a shared feeling of
vulnerability. I often talk about this as a form of seduction, an
engagement 
between myself and a system that is bigger or more powerful than me. 

As for this question of fiction, it has come up lately, especially in my
new work Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, (LOVE in police 
radiotelephony language). please see my site:
www.lincoln-ocean-victor-eddy.net. I wrote a novella of the same title
that is shown 
within an installation and also autonomously, to be read on its own,
separate from the artwork. The novella is based on my experiences 
shadowing a police officer in the subways of NYC during his nighttime
surveillance rounds. I do not present the book, nor the installation, 
as documentation; I am concerned with the story as a poetic observation
and a mysterious relationship. The question of this work- as fiction or 
nonfiction, surfaces mainly in the literary world. One editor said to me
that for him, truth happens the minute a word is placed on 
a page. I love this, but then where does it place an experience written
about that 'did happen'? Are they the same? I am curious to explore 
fiction verses reality as fiction becoming reality or vice versa. 

"I seek intimate relationships with impersonal structures. The systems I
choose to work with, such as police, secret services, CCTV and forensic
identification, function at a distance, with a wide-angle perspective,
equalizing everyone and erasing the individual. I seek the potential
softness and intimacy of their technologies, the fallacy of their
omniscient point of view, the ways in which they hold memory (yet often
cease to remember), their engrained position in society (the cause of
their invisibility), their authority, their apparent intangibility and,
with all of this, their potential reversibility." 

More soon, 
Jill

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