[-empyre-] Transitions: "New Media and the Middle East"

[Isak Berbic]

Watching the Sinai natural gas pipeline explosion burning on the television yesterday I couldn't help but think about the similar images of vigorous flames shooting out from the ground in the videos from the Gulf wars. Much of those videos however, having mostly been recorded by soldiers in the desert, appear somewhere more distant, within an empty landscape and without any evident sense of place. Yesterday’s flame however is cradled by several date palm trees, a telecommunications post with a white building structure in the foreground.

Coincidently I began to think about some old images by Ed Ruscha. Having recently visited the RSTW exhibition in Abu Dhabi (RSTW, From the private collection of Larry Gagosian) I encountered some of his Californian palm tree photographs as well as variations on his fire works. Ruscha’s images abbreviate detail to the basic shapes and signifiers much in the way low quality video does to moving images. As I looked at the television screen broadcasting the flame, It was as if Ruscha’s palm trees and his burning gas station compiled into one single event on the Sinai.

In reference to this post some new images have been added to: http://isakb.blogspot.com/

Isak Berbic
February 7th, 2011


      
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