Self-Surveillance

Self-Surveillance / / / An ongoing research project by Toby Kaufmann-Buhler / / / This page serves as a running repository of present, future and past work for this project (including some "pre-project" work, and source material on which all this is based... see links on the sidebar), plus some inspirations. This project has been in progress for several years in different, fragmented forms (mostly in my mind, but occasionally taking outward form, as detailed on this page). It is autobiographical, semi-biographical, and completely quasi-fictional. More info on me: http://oscillation.org/tkbuhler/

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Playlot

I'm getting back to doing some new work in the project with a new piece, Playlot. This work is somewhat open ended, as it is interactive, in a very similar way to another recent (non-project) work, Sawing Sound video study grid; this new work has very different elements and properties that make it distinctive from that work.

This is a short demo of how the work "plays"....

Here is a statement i've been working on about Playlot:

In what kind of space is play allowed? Where is play created and nurtured? The borders of play have always been fluid, but also always constricted and policed. A playlot is a place within a place, for the play within. Is there a button for this?

Something i've become aware of with this work is a relationship to early SS work, particularly the film/text video work. In that work i was playing with text relationships, family relationships, the film frame and video frame (emphasis on the play). In this new work, i'm finding the frame in other places out in the world, and i'm interested in how that frame works out there, in relationship to play and how this frames my family relative, the poet Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943).

Kolmar's presence is part of this specific place (and physically, its frame): this is a small neighborhood park in Chicago which was dedicated in her name in 2022.

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Parallel to All Ghosts

We are all pieces; we all play our parts. We are all in pieces; we all fall apart.

This new work has developed directly from my exhibition "Parallel to all truth" in May 2024; most of the elements of this work were separate and individuated in that show, across different but overlapping installations. Here they are all knitted together, joined with a focal element that did not appear in the exhibition. This is the sound of the Gatling gun; i recorded this along with the view of the gravesite at Crown Hill cemetery (Indianapolis) on Memorial Day 2022.

It's taken me a long time to settle on how to work with the sound of the Gatling gun. First, i needed to find my opportunity to record it, and it turned out that the particular space and specific time of that recording really mattered (and is an important part of this new piece).

I had hoped to record this in the very same location on the same holiday in 2021, in anticipation of my time in residency at MASS MoCA that summer. The pandemic cancelled that plan, and subsequently i made work with sound that echoed the gun, but this was still a poor imitation. A year later i had the sound, but i found it was too powerful to use in an "exposed" way; i didn't want to create unnecessary, gratuitous triggers in the work. In this work i want to bring the sound down, to make it more "equal" with other elements so that it doesn't dominate; while still recognizing its specific "gravity", the way it demands attention.

This is a sound that has become all too common, but also still resides in a contested space. Somehow it can be readily acceptable in a place that is normally devoted to peace (and quiet) for the multitudes laid to rest there, due to the holiday. Despite this, it can't be separated from the crisis we are currently in, ongoing and severe.

This work is about finding my way into this space, and working in it.

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This short video is documentation of my exhibition, "Parallel to all truth" at The Arts Federation (Lafayette, Indiana) in May 2024.

This show featured a video installation with three screens, and a stereo sound installation. The work contained in each installation:

on upright screens: Parallel to All Ghosts (Hambidge trail 1 - 4), Parallel to All Ghosts (Crown Hill)

on center screen: Parallel to All Truth (Hambidge)

on speakers: Hambidge (streams outside Cove Studio; inside large Spring House; inside Magraw Spring House; frog chorus off Betty's Creek Road)

More details and background about the show and this work.

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Parallel to all truth (statement)

(Statement included in the exhibition)

I grew up walking in forests and in cemeteries, and these places have grown and contained my mind. Walking in a forest is not totally different from walking in a cemetery; in both, paths and trails control views, directions and perspective in general. What is present in the mind and what (or who) may be present or lost depends very much on how one can take the place in.

I spent a few weeks in early 2023 at an artist residency in rural northern Georgia, nestled in the forested Rabun Gap. While there, I had very easy access to a network of forest trails, winding through a variety of elevations. Since it was still winter-time, there were many distant views to be glimpsed even with the density of the forest, and this openness lent itself to my thinking about how to work there. Walking through those wooded paths, I felt a sense of connection, not only to the landscape, but to my father who often took me on walks when I was young.

Prior to this, on a warm and sunny Memorial day in 2022, I visited Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis to witness the annual firing of a Gatling gun at the gravesite of its inventor and my ancestor, Richard Jordan Gatling. This surreal holiday event drew a small crowd of on-lookers, who gathered around the gun and the re-enactors, intent on taking in this small piece of history. I wanted to collect this watchfulness, and the sound that followed this waiting, all in this larger place. There, the Gatling gun was a central, commanding focus of attention. I wanted to see and hear the gun in a larger context, and try to locate it further in place, within myself and the history it is embedded in. The turmoil the gun signifies is all too common in our culture, and we need to collectively contend with this, with urgency.

These two experiences are brought into relationship with a collection of texts that are simultaneously markers of time and the structure of family. Gathered from late 19th and early 20th century publications, each text represents an individual voice in a specific time, and as such also has a parallel with the cemetery, where individuals find their place, often in close proximity to their larger family. Here in these texts is one element that connects them closely together, that of the Gatling gun; this brings a historical parallel with myself (as part of my larger family) and the larger culture. The texts act like gravestones, exposed to time and all the weathering elements, their original qualities becoming very worn. The lettering and design of the originals do show through, but my acts on them (along with previous translations through different mediums) are somewhat akin to the work of time.

I grew up walking in forests and in cemeteries, and these places continue to grow and contain my mind.

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Parallel to the Ghosts

In the months between starting to plan this show (in the middle of last year) and now, much has changed with how i've been looking at the work and how i've structured this exhibition. These changes had a lot to do with external resource considerations ($), but in the end this brought about a focus on some elemental parts of the work from my residency early last year at the Hambidge Center, along with the development of material from earlier on.

Early on i had a greater ambition with this show, but since re-focusing it, i came to look at the material a bit differently and this also helped me to think about my experience at Hambidge in a different way (in the frame of this exhibition). All this made me consider it in relation to my residency time at MASS MoCA in 2021, during which i had started working on new video ideas (shot there and subsequently manipulated with Signal Culture apps). These ideas carried forward to Hambidge, where i found myself in a very different environment from MASS MoCA, but considering some of the same ideas as i walked on the trails in the woods there.

Among the work for this show is a new video series, "Parallel to All Ghosts", which so far comprises a few different video parts with material from Hambidge and from a visit during the prior year to Crown Hill cemetery in Indianapolis. This work has developed directly from a piece i've been working on since MASS MoCA ("Always Returning"), which uses the same ideas, now appearing in a different (yet parallel) form in this show.

I'm still thinking through the ideas in this work, but the relationships i have been able to find and develop in this current show (particularly between myself, my "ghosts", and the repetitions of the gun in many different guises) have a lot of resonances which i want to continue exploring. I don't yet know where this is going but i'm sure there are more ghosts out there.

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Parallel texts

A few words about the texts found in my current exhibition, "Parallel to All Truth":

The texts featured in the video "Parallel to All Truth (Hambidge)" are simultaneously markers of time and the structure of family. Gathered from late 19th and early 20th century publications, each text represents an individual voice in a specific time, and as such also has a parallel with the cemetery, where individuals find their place, often in close proximity to their larger family.

Here in these texts is one element that brings them into relationship together, that of the Gatling gun; this brings a historical parallel with myself (as part of my larger family) and the larger culture. My view and work with these texts is not without some cost (which happens in translation), when introducing them into my work process. Something like graves which are exposed to time and all the weathering elements, their original qualities become very worn. The lettering and design of the originals do show through, but my acts on them (along with previous translations through a number of mediums) are somewhat akin to the work of time.

Here this wear is the aforementioned translation through the different mediums (from printing on paper, to scanned print, to cropped digital image, to 35mm slide film, to lens-based analog video, and finally to digital video), which becomes at the same time both repetition and transformation. Repetition appears in different ways, and specifically with the texts is most visible in the pixel repetition required for blowing up the imagery. More of this kind of repetition appears elsewhere in the work, and this leads me to a question surrounding the Gatling gun: has this gun now become a repetition (and more of the same), or is its continued and repeated presence something more significant?

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Project path ~ Further into the trees

(part 3 of 3)

After doing work focused on the Gatling gun for a few years, i began to feel and realize that it was becoming too concentrated on this. Pulling back from it, i saw that i wanted to continue creating broader connections, and at the same time think about structures, particularly my family structure.

During a residency at MASS MoCA in 2021 i started thinking about and visualizing family tree structures in very schematic ways; this led me to start considering the Gatling gun itself as a part of my family, and what this could do (or has done) to myself and my family.

In early 2023 during a residency at the Hambidge Center i was doing work specifically using text accounts referencing the gun, which appeared in published media from the late 19th and early 20th century. During those few weeks in the forests of northern Georgia, i spent a lot of time working out in the woods, thinking about relationships of distance, and how these accounts of the gun both use it and attempt to create distance from it. Using this distance embedded in the text material, i attempted to create structures with this material mirroring the family tree, showing the close relationships between language and the gun.

In turn, i am now thinking about how this parallels with my family, as a microcosm to the larger culture which can't escape what it has created.

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Project path ~ Some family isn't past

(part 2 of 3)

This project has always been about elements of my family; there have always been elements of it i have wanted to focus on, and others i have been uncertain about how to approach, yet have felt the urgency to consider in the work. This has long been the case with the Gatling gun, and several years after beginning the SS project i found an approach. It turned out that proximity was a key factor, when a home move brought me very close to the place where the gun was first invented, and the Gatling family gravesite.

It was always a subject of some fascination that this gun was part of my family history, and also a creeping sense of discomfort as i grew older. Before beginning the SS project, i never really had a way of framing this as a subject in my work; with this project and my newfound proximity, i suddenly felt there was a way to approach it. The ways i began doing this were informed quite a bit by the collage methods i had developed in the earlier work, but it also took on an assemblage-like form in the installation work; i realized i wanted a more physical object-oriented work, which could be approached and also handled by people. I wanted the subject of the work to also be an object, both seen and felt.

At the same time that i started this work about the Gatling gun, i also became aware (through my research and through popular media) that perception of the gun is much more widespread than i had thought possible, and that there is an extensive history of these connections distributed throughout the culture. This realization led me to begin work looking at these connections, and to create relationships in the manner of some of the earlier project work.

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Project path ~ Thinking about past words

(part 1 of 3)

When i started the SS project 10 years ago, i really wanted to change directions in my work: to get more personal with it, to focus on new material and new methods. I was coming off some successful projects, and after nearly a decade of working with very intense methods i needed a change.

This personal work began to take form when i started thinking about all the texts i was surrounded by, and had been my whole life. There had always been so many books associated with my family, so much more than i had ever been able to read (still the case), and so much beyond my understanding. I then realized that i could gain access to some understanding of my father (for one) from his writing; to know his ways of thinking, how he organized the world. There was still much i didn't and couldn't understand in the writing, but there were small hints that gave me access to his viewpoint.

These elements are what i started to focus on, in his writing and others, and i soon realized that i could create a kind of (very short) dialogue between these elements. These juxtapositions were very important in this early project work, as they gave me the kind of simultaneous flexibility and focus necessary, while working with new methods in different mediums, to push the work forward.

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This amount of time

It's been 10 years since i began the Self-Surveillance project, and a lot has happened in the meantime... a lot in the work (both major and minor), personally two multi-state home moves, and plenty more.

I want to reflect on the project as i conceived it, as it has developed and as it is now. It's taken some twists and turns, developing offshoots and tangents that have been very fruitful in some cases. One of the main aspects i want to think about from the beginning (and even before i created the first proper SS work in 2013-14) is that in the initial conception this project was meant to be about my family. At that time i was still strongly motivated by a desire to make work that was not about myself and my identity, but my family was another story and another place (or places). The work has developed largely in this way, and i've been able to explore areas very unfamiliar to me.

I don't think this work is by any means done or exhausted, but as usual it's hard for me to locate where i am with it; by this i mean both the stage the project is currently in, and also where "I" am "in it". While i still think the latter aspect is of lesser importance, i am making progress with it, and this has importance in plotting the relationship connections which have meaning and relevance for the work. One thing that has animated and motivated my directions with the work has been the contradictions that i see in my family, particularly across different branches, and how they seem (solely from my perspective) to have coalesced into how i have formed.

I think most people, in being able to look at parts of their family going back generations (as I am very fortunate to be able), would find some contradiction or paradox, something that is difficult to rectify either personally or historically. For my work, i hope to explore these contradictions and not to flatten them, to see the complexities, particularly because they are both personal and historical (and i hope i'm being successful at this). Maybe because of this, i think there could be relevance for the future, in the difficult labyrinth we have to navigate in order to get there.

Now, i am preparing new work for a solo show, and this will be my first installation work in 5 years. I'm hoping that the development of this work for the SS project will reflect a lot of what has come before, and also an evolution into new areas of possibility. As i have experienced in the past with making installation work, this can go far in suggesting new ways of working, methods and relationships with the audience. I hope that this will be the case again in the next few months. While i do hope that at the center this current work reflects the place from which it has developed, and that in some ways it carries (and moves me) forward, i also hope that the work can be something, or somehow, good in the world.

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Machines and descendants

"The credit of the good work must be widely distributed."

This new video work is a central element of a solo exhibition I will have during May 2024, to take place at The Arts Federation galleries in Lafayette, Indiana (supported by a grant from The Arts Federation, and the National Endowment for the Arts).

The work in this exhibition tracks the development over the past 5 years in my Self-Surveillance body of work, specifically in relation to the Gatling gun, and my evolving approaches to examining its relationship to my family, culture and myself.

With the Self-Surveillance project, I am continually examining my family connections and relationships (between individuals of the past and with myself), so that I can create work exploring these, thereby deepening my knowledge and understanding of these connections. During the past 10 years of developing this project, the work has taken quite a few directions with some pathways short and meandering, and others deep and complex. The latter parts have at times been difficult to map out, since the terrain has been hard to grasp and access to it is limited (even though it seems somewhat open at first).

This indistinct area is where I have found myself with Richard Jordan Gatling and the gun he invented. The gun, while widely known and documented, has in many ways obscured the inventor as a person (and certainly any firsthand testimony, which may have been by design). As has happened with previous work, in the case of my new work the Gatling gun has spoken for him, through many different voices.

In this exhibition the plan is for the new work to be joined by an installation from 2019, "Machine (far too low)", and several single-channel videos made between 2019-2021. The installation work is a deconstruction and re-creation of the Gatling gun concept. The videos range from a "view" inside that installation operation ("Ammunition of Uncertain Origin"), to a work examining the gun's "translation" into descendent inventions ("Echo of the Machine"), to a work proposing a "family tree" set of relationships tying the gun together with my own family experience ("Building Trees: the shooting goes on").

Another core aspect of this exhibition will be a series of workshops, held in the gallery space with the intention of "activating" the installation work with the assistance of participants. The participants will be able to interact with the installation and contribute sound material directly to it, which will manipulate the visual result and also be recorded in portions for documentation and integration into later work.

More information about the new work in this exhibition to follow.

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Parallel to all truth

Since my residency earlier this year at the Hambidge Center, i have been working on finishing one of the main video projects started and developed from material generated while down there in the north Georgia mountains. This video is a result of my central experience working there; much of the work i did in that studio (and quite a bit outside of it) has gone into this.

This video (and the future work it's aligned with) is another way of looking at and thinking about the Gatling gun and its effects. How many different ways can we examine a gun like this? It seems like the answer to this is intimately connected to the number of ways and reasons a gun like this can be used; it's a complicated and complex determination, and for me it's also very connected to the history of representation the gun is wrapped up in.

This gun is part of the long tradition of firearms in the US, and although it has never been a "personal" firearm (despite the occasional fantastical representation as handheld), since the 19th century it has been taken up in language usage in very idiosyncratic and sometimes personal ways. Perhaps more than any other way, this has "personalized" the Gatling gun, and connected it to the ever-increasing personal attitude toward firearm ownership and usage in this country. The work in this video (and the installation concept it's connected to) examines the very personal use of this gun as an element of language.

For myself the "personal" in this work is also embedded in the Hambidge Center material, particularly the time spent in the forest, walking and observing. I was brought up to have a healthy respect for the natural world (especially connected to various locations along the eastern US), and to find my place in it. My time at the residency, in a studio embedded in the forest, helped me to make this re-connection and to create parallel connections in the work.

The structures of this work, including the gun as figure of speech and metaphor, the forest as structure, the family "tree", and the soundtrack (the saw embedded and constantly working itself into the sound of the forest) are in a conversation with each other. This conversation has been found amongst these very disparate elements, and the parallels of different kinds of "truths".

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Thinking about Hambidge & new work

Recently i was able to go on a three week residency (supported by a grant from The Arts Federation) at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, nestled in the mountains there very close to the border with North Carolina. I stayed in a live-work studio (very much isolated in the forest), where i had an abundance of time and space to develop new ideas and work.

The largest project i got into working on in this fantastic place is a new interactive video/sound installation idea, which also developed (while at the residency) into a new single-channel video project. The concept for these projects is centered around historical published texts referencing the Gatling gun (from newspapers and other publications dating between the 1890s-1920s); this work creates relationships between these texts working with the long legacy of the gun, and also creates connections with my experience in Georgia. Both the installation and video projects share a title, "Parallel to all truth", taken from one of these historical publications which uses the Gatling gun as a surprising metaphor and an instrument in the writer’s goals (and this repeats throughout a number of other publications of the period).

There are some other projects i'm planning to work on with material gathered at Hambidge, including both sound and video. While there i made quite a few field recordings in the forests and in different structures throughout the property. The environment there is very interesting, and there are many unique historical structures (dating back a century or more) with great acoustic features. I made recordings inside some of these with some saw playing, and plan to incorporate these into new saw-oriented sound work.

As a first foray into working and engaging with this sound material, recently I was invited to perform at a VASTLAB screening at Chicago Filmmakers (excerpts of the performance here); i put together a saw performance featuring a field recording of the night-time frog chorus in Betty’s Creek (around a 10 minute walk from my studio at Hambidge).

I also recorded video out on the trails in the forest around my studio, and have plans to use this in a new project. This video work is an extension of the Always Returning project (see previous post), using similar techniques in creating and manipulating the video, and juxtaposing it with video (and sound) recorded at the Crown Hill cemetery in Indianapolis last year.

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Always Returning

Always Returning, 2022 (for 3 monitors, 2 headphones)

In this work there is a constant returning, a return which repeats throughout my life in different, intimate places, in parallel with the constant repetition of gunfire, unpredictable yet omnipresent and everywhere. 

I've returned to these places quite a few times throughout my life; to the Chappaqua Quaker cemetery (where my father is buried) since I was very small, and a number of times since this video originated in 1999. To Crown Hill cemetery (where the Gatling family is buried) several times since making home in Indiana in 2016. The Gatling gun has followed me throughout my life, so for me the latter has become its burial place as well. Although it may be buried there, as observed in this video the gun is very much alive and is a totem on one side of myself, with nonviolence on another side. The bridge connects these two parts, which are separated by a kind of void. The passage between these parts, the transition across brings the possibility of connection or reconciliation of the parts for the traveler; the fact of physical disconnection and mental rupture between them also means a resolution may never be possible. 

I am constantly moving between these two sides, along the same well-trodden path. In parallel, all of us are constantly retracing the same footsteps, the same exact paths, the same exact moves, and always returning to the same positions. 

Below is the single-channel variation of this work, and at this website is a mock-up of the 3-channel version as meant for an installation.

Always Returning (single-channel)

Single-channel variation of a 3-channel video installation

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Voices of violence

I'm working on a project which has been ongoing since 2020, and which I had planned to make progress on while at the residency at MASS MoCA (this was rescheduled by the pandemic twice, scrambling my plans). Once i finally made it to North Adams in June 2021 this work was on the backburner, in particular because I wasn't able to gather some key material for it before the residency (more on this below).

Despite this work being essentially in the background (at least of my working mind), I managed to collect some really good material at the residency which has become central to the development of this project. This is both video and sound, and like the other work i did at MASS MoCA this material is very connected to my everyday experience of being there.

The other element of this work is something important that i have only recently been able to gather: recordings of the firing of a Gatling gun, which happened on the Memorial Day holiday recently at Crown Hill cemetery in Indianapolis. I've wanted to record this in previous years, but this was the first time the event happened since the pandemic began.

This work is concentrated on the idea of gun violence (and in a larger sense, warfare), and my family's relationship to this. This project is another development in my ongoing work engaging with the Gatling gun; with this project I'm exploring connections between the gun and violence/death, along with the contemporary fascination with firearms which creates the illusion of a wide separation between these elements despite their intimate correlation.

As currently developed, this work has three elements, each a video and soundtrack pair. Mirroring our contemporary degenerative situation with gun violence in the United States, there are two "sides" to this work, encompassed by two of the videos/soundtracks. The third element acts as a "bridge" between these sides.

Each of these three elements contains a voice, and in the work they are each constantly talking; sometimes this is a conversation, but often they are dissociated and not engaging with one another.

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Family traffic

With my recent exhibition (Kingdom Loops 2002-2020) in London at Project DIVFUSE, I was fortunately able to travel over for it, and to spend time visiting family there as well. This experience has shown me that the work in this show largely overlaps with the Self-surveillance project, despite the fact that this work was not itself SS work.

The origin of the work in this show mainly pre-dates the SS concept, and as such they don't connect with the family-oriented work I have focused on during the past 10+ years. Despite this, there are elements of the work itself that do connect with SS: this has to do with my time living in London, at the end of which was spent making repeated visits to the German embassy there in the process of applying for a passport. If there is an "origin story" for the SS work this would be it, as gaining the passport set me on a path to thinking about my identity and family in particular ways.

Another (smaller, but still important) factor for my route to SS is about the specific setting of these videos in Kingdom Loops: although overlooking Hammersmith Broadway with my camera, this was not the only camera there at the time, as there were many surveillance cameras arrayed throughout that space (visible and not visible from our vantage point). This pervasive surveillance had a large impact on the work and thinking I did at the time, and future working methods.

The other important part about this exhibition (and my trip to London) is the fact that this work brought together a number of people in my family; it was not a reunion in the conventional sense, but I had the chance to share the exhibition space with many of them individually, which is a very rare thing for me.

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Kingdom Loops

I'm very fortunate to soon be having an exhibition that was completely unthinkable a few months ago. I’m showing video work at Project DIVFUSE, a small gallery in Hackney, London, in a solo exhibition called Kingdom Loops 2002-2020.

While this show is unexpected and surprising for me, there is a full-circle aspect to it that i'm also excited about. It's been 20 years since i lived in London, where i went to art school (for 2 years) and graduated in 2003. Along with this, the work in this exhibition originated at the place we lived (in Hammersmith), so this is a return not just for me but for the work itself, very close to where it started.

For two years we lived in a third-floor flat directly overlooking Hammersmith Broadway, one of the busiest traffic and transit hubs in west London. Since i was focusing on video at that time, this view with its masses of movement and activity frequently attracted my camera. In early 2002, I made a small, short video (going along with some experimental sound i was developing), which attempted to document and work with the constant intensity of the place.

In the summer of 2020, I was organizing and cataloguing my early video archive, returning to the DV tapes of my early work. In the process I found some long shot takes from the window of the old flat, recorded on a bright September afternoon in 2003. These amount to over two hours of static framed footage, with everything inside the frame (as with the 2002 video) in perpetual movement. Finding this long-forgotten material led me to develop a new video which would be a kind of evolution of the former work, in some ways expressing both the distance and growth between the two works (on one hand) and the intervening years (on the other).

Both videos, Keys to the Kingdom and Sawing the Kingdom, use sound in somewhat different ways. Both pieces keep the original environmental sound of the place (central to the atmosphere of it), along with layers of artificial, tonally minimal sound from different sources. The early piece uses a repetitious phrase (a kind of key) partly constructed from samples of the keys of a thumb piano. The later piece has a soundtrack developed with the singing saw, using tonal layers in long repetitious decays and constantly changing relationships.

This latter video was originally recorded just before we moved out of the Hammersmith Broadway flat, ahead of relocating to the US later that fall. One thing I was also able to do before leaving England was to apply at the German embassy in London for a German passport (with much help from my family), which I then received. This experience, and the thought process which it invoked during the following years, led me to re-focus my work and begin the Self-Surveillance project.