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belit sağ: Excessive Ideas

by Chi-hui Yang

In belit sağ’s video practice, the photographic image is an excessive object—an object whose meaning is shaped by forces beyond its frame, wields and condenses social power, and controls bodies and behaviors. The image is also one which demands. It structures seeing as a political act and insists on response, analysis, and accountability. It is capable of violence, of telling truth, half-truth and falsity, and of reproducing itself. It possesses radical possibility.

sağ is a collector and deconstructor of images. Central to her practice is an inquiry into how state power and violence flow through the image; how production, circulation and interpretation of photographs and video reveal optical regimes, shaping the visible or invisible, the accountable or forgotten. sağ builds her videos from images which mold and reinforce social behaviors and narratives: newspaper archives, social media, cinema, propaganda tapes, surveillance video, television news. Through gesture, collage, abstraction, and most importantly, text, her works examine how ideology is embedded in representations of reality, and the spells these forces are capable of casting.  

sağ is concerned with the nation, race and ideology—social formations which are often called upon to justify violence. An artist from Turkey based in Amsterdam, the subjects of her first-person video essays are the charged dynamics created by the relationship between Turkey’s borders and national identity: Ayhan Çarkın, a paramilitary policeman understood to have killed hundreds of Kurds on behalf of the Turkish state; memories of conflict on the Turkish-Syrian border; and in her most recent work, the murder of Turkish and Kurdish individuals by a German Neo-Nazi group. The titles of her videos reflect that her inquiry is not just about politics, but the complicity of the image within: my camera seems to recognize people (2016), and the image gazes back (2014), overexposed (2017), cut-out (2017), grain (2016). Her videos are staged as encounters with images whose real and symbolic power require interrogation, self-reflexive conversations between her and fragments of video or grainy photos about the creative and political act of filmmaking itself, and the role and precarity of the artist in conducting it.

In Ayhan and Me (2016), sağ examines notions of artistic production, censorship, and control through her relationship as an artist with the images of Ayhan Çarkın. A video about its own making and a critique of social and artistic institutions, it charts the trajectory of the video from being one about Çarkın, to one about the symbol of Çarkın, and its power to censor. In 2015, sağ was asked to create work for an exhibition supported by the Istanbul arts center Akbank Sanat. When the gallery learned that the piece would concern Çarkın, it bowed to political pressure and censored the project. In the fourteen-minute piece, she crumbles, bends, over exposes and obscures a photograph of Çarkın, exercising her own power over it even while the photograph determines the parameters of her video. She muses “questioning who manipulates who, is a part of [her] practice, even perhaps has become its backbone in this climate of war.”

In an earlier work, and the image gazes back (2014) she examines the relationship between the political act and mass-circulating media images, real and fictive, by asking what informs and distinguishes one’s actions from the representations of them. Weaving together references to ISIS, Twitter, Dog Day Afternoon, photographs from the occupation of television stations during the Romanian Revolution, and the television broadcast of the 1982 Spanish Parliament Coup,  she asks whether there is a distinction between images capturing us and us being captured by images, pointing to “images that reimagine the real and on the other hand, realities that look like they are faking fiction.”

In her most recent videos, (Against) Randomness, overexposed and cut-out (all 2017), sağ examines the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murders, where between the years 2000-2007, Turks and Kurds were targeted and killed in Germany by this Neo-Nazi group. The three together form an inquiry into the construction of history, memory, and the optics of justice. (Against) Randomness calls for the necessity of narrativization—the linking of related histories together to reveal patterns of violence and abuse of power. In this text-driven video, amidst fragmented images of everyday life, she muses on remembrance, forgetfulness, and what allows traces of lives made invisible to be seen. In the video she writes, “storytelling is resistance against the perception that life is a series of random events.”

This idea of forging connective tissue as resistance animates cut-out, an examination of the media photos of individuals murdered by the NSU. Moving through each individual’s newspaper image, she asks what they tell us—what the lighting, background, quality and cropping reveal about the individuals. Intimate portraits of the victims’ lives are offered through holiday photos, studio portraits, and passport images. What do the excesses of these images say? What isn’t included in the images that we can draw out, what does a background color or a gesture reveal, and how are these separate lives linked? While sağ intentionally omits images of violence, its spectre is conjured in the mind of the viewer, through the act of sewing together the connections between the disparate yet intimate lives on display. What cannot be seen but only imagined often exceeds reality and can operate as a powerful political tool and creative device.

The architectural and cultural biases built into the criminal trials of the NSU murders are explored in overexposed. sağ uses a schematic of the Munich courtroom where the trials were held, choosing to dissect the tightly controlled lines of sight between those occupying the room. The denied visual connections between victims, their families, witnesses, lawyers, and public are accounted for while transcripts reveal embedded biases favoring the accused. The relationship between optics and justice is suggested: to deny the emotional and political insights that come from access to facial expression and eye contact is to deny solidarity, accountability and legibility.

Sağ’s videos are incantations orchestrated to demystify the photographic machinery of ideology, to not only hold power accountable, but to counter it with critical deconstruction. They ask how images accumulate meaning and influence, what imprint they have on us and how this mark can shape actions and intentions both present and future. Confrontations both urgent and necessary, her essayistic encounters press for greater truths in a moment when the image’s hold on veracity has been obscured.■ Chi-hui Yang is a curator based in New York. He is currently Program Officer for Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative, a global effort that supports non-fiction filmmakers and organizations whose work addresses the most urgent social issues of our time. As a curator, he has presented programs such as: MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, “Lines and Nodes: Media, Infrastructure, and Aesthetics” (2014, Anthology Film Archives) and “The Age of Migration” (2008, Flaherty Film Seminar). From 2000-2010 he was director of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Yang is also an instructor at Brooklyn’s UnionDocs and has served as an adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and Hunter College. He earned a master’s degree in film studies from San Francisco State University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Stanford University. This essay was written for the exhibition belit sağ: Let Me Remember at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. On view January 19–April 14, 2018, Tuesday–Saturday, 12–5pm. The gallery is free and open to the public. Still: belit sağ. kesik (cut-out), 2017/2018, Netherlands/Turkey. HD video with sound, 3min40sec. Courtesy the artist.

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We remember

by Almudena Escobar López

Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on and have to think: if film is possible, then history too is possible. - Voiceover from Videograms of a Revolution (Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică (1992) When we tell a story, a little piece of ourselves travels with our words, to be shared with those who are listening. By telling, we reimagine and project ourselves into the narrative, creating a living archive in constant flux. belit sağ’s archival practice works in a similar way: it allows the stories to exist. This doesn’t mean that what we hear are direct testimonies of the voiceless, or that the camera changes hands in a participatory documentary mode. Instead, fiction and personal reflection create a tangential line that cracks open the surface of the present. By disrupting the circulation of images and questioning their meaning, sağ reminds viewers that there are responsibilities involved in the act of looking and that our field of vision is determined by political parameters of visibility. As an alternative to visual passive consumption, sağ proposes a focused and receptive mode of watching that requires awareness and an alert attitude towards media. This “expanded viewing” is more than seeing, it is a personal meditative exercise that invites the viewer to defocus their knowledge, amplifying it to things that are overlooked, left on the side or simply ignored. By carefully describing what is actually in the images, speculating about their contextualization, or by explaining the field of vision of the attendees of a courtroom, sağ explores the margins of historical documentation. In cut-out (2017/2018) the viewer is confronted with the composite image circulated in the press which included the portraits of the ten victims of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) murders. These were a series of hate crimes perpetrated by the far-right terrorist organization between 2000-2007 throughout Germany. Since the murders started, the German government ignored the racist nature of the crimes, treating them as isolated attacks or as mafia related assaults. sağ shows the victims as they were presented in the press in a group of small portraits, and describes them, one by one, focusing on the material details of each image. What do we see when we look at the portrait of a murdered victim in the media? sağ wonders around the margins of these images, speculating about the personal relationships between the subject in the photograph and the image itself. Did the victim see this portrait? Where was the image taken? Is it a photograph? Is it a silhouette separated from a group photograph? Is it a passport image? The images that before were operating within certain pre established historical parameters, start to expand, proposing different functionalities. In askama (disruption) (2016) sağ composes a collage with found materials that gradually communicate with each other. The footage is both from popular films and from the Turkish news during the failed coup attempt in July 2016. The composite image is superimposed on first-person footage of sağ’s feet while walking from point A to point B. Here all the images are operating independently from each other, while also exploring their mutual relationships by means of the subjective position of the filmmaker. Likewise, the intertwined relationship between the found images and sağ’s pacing relate to the overwhelming feeling that the saturation of images in the media provokes. askama (disruption) creates an open playground where knowledge is generated through the friction between facts and subjective fictional production. sağ’s “expanded viewing” invites audiences to develop close relationships with events in which they did not participate. The re-telling becomes a live activation of the archive, an invitation to perform in unison with the images cohabitating the space with sağ herself. sağ envisions an open concept of archive where affective connections between subjects and objects are central. Her storytelling and the storytelling of others, becomes an act of resistance against the linearity of history, and its predetermined contextualization of images. For sağ archival images are durational points in time that can be rewinded and forwarded. This temporal flexibility explores the hierarchical structures of image production questioning the intake of images, their impact, and their later processing by the subject. (Against) Randomness (2017) was made for the People’s Tribunal against the NSU attacks. In this case, the purpose of the narrative is to create solidarity among the victims. Their discourse in the shape of textual quotes takes over in an attempt to disrupt the enclosed public image tailored by the state around the murders. Quotes appear and disappear on the screen over a background of enlarged details from digital images borrowed from personal and public archives related to the case. The words do not include the references, avoiding the hierarchy that they create. It doesn’t matter where they are coming from, all the elements of the narrative are equally important and function as a network. Functioning on a similar connective level, overexposed (2017/2018) is an installation piece that combines transcriptions of the NSU trials made by local activist organizations, with images of the crime scenes from the press. Edited in between are schematic drawings of the courtroom where the trials took place, explaining how each of the parties were allocated and what their field of vision was. The personal narrative of the victims in this case is spatially situated in the courtroom. The viewer did not participate in the trials but now is able to glimpse over the spatial interrelations of the stories that are heard. overexposed is a temporal collapse between the images of the murders, the courtroom, the transcription, sağ’s voice reading the transcriptions, and the viewer. Suddenly the images that before were functioning within certain preconditions of knowledge, start to transform themselves into spaces of reflection and mirroring. Memory displays itself as a modular space of interconnections, and storytelling becomes a closer look at facts. This treatment of the archive as an open space–shareable and autonomous– differs from the enclosed static idea of the public archive as a repository of knowledge. Here the archive is both lived and conceptual. sağ’s independently open archive is based on contextualization, interpersonal relationships, and the redistribution of information. Her “expanded viewing” is more than simply reorganizing the archive through reappropriation, it is about cultivating a critical approach to knowledge that recognizes the importance of the emergent and the residual.■ Almudena Escobar López is an archivist, film curator, and scholar from Spain. She is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester where she also holds a Public Humanities Fellowship. Her dissertation explores the notion of collaborative aesthetics in relation to ideas of artistic cooperativism, paying particular attention to the filmmaker’s cooperatives founded in the 1960s in New York, San Francisco, and London. She combines her academic research and writing with her practice as a film archivist and curator having worked at institutions such as Lux Artists’ moving image, The Academy Film Archive, the Archives of American Art and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. She has published essays in MUBI Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage: the Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Journal of Film Preservation, Little White Lies, Desistfilm Magazine, and has collaborated with the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the London Spanish Film Festival, and the East End Film Festival of the London International Film Festival. She is co-programmer of the collective screening project On-Film, serves in the Advisory Board of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY, and in the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY.

This essay was written for the exhibition belit sağ: Let Me Remember at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. On view January 19–April 14, 2018, Tuesday–Saturday, 12–5pm. The gallery is free and open to the public. Still: belit sağ. aşırı pozlanmış (overexposed), 2017/2018, Netherlands/Turkey. HD video with sound, 4min20sec. Installation documentation courtesy of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center.

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Man-Made Environments and the Language of the Pick-Up Artist

by Dorothy R. Santos

Women, thus unable to regulate their interactions with male strangers in public places, are robbed of an important privilege of urban life: their anonymity. Women learn to be constantly on the alert, both consciously and unconsciously, in order to protect vulnerable boundaries from male trespasses. Researchers have demonstrated that women avoid eye contact, stiffen body posture, restrict movements, and move out of the way of pedestrian traffic more than men, a pattern of submissive behavior observed in animal societies. Irwin Altman, a psychologist, maintains that this behavior requires an enormous amount of energy which "places great stress on adrenal and cardiovascular systems, resulting in heightened psychological tension and anxiety...[and] psychic damage. (1)

The environment, however you may want to define it as such, is not something we can easily control, unless it is within the comfort or confines of the home. Even in the home, various types of behavior and media will make its way into the home for consumption. The home can be a lonely place if allowed to sit and wallow in solitude, which may provoke one to go out, be social, and engage. In Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, scholar Leslie Kanes Weisman offers insights into proverbial American home and on to the consumerist space of the shopping mall through a gendered lens. Although it may seem strange to bring up feminist architectural theory in relationship to gaming, they are inextricably tied. The minute any woman steps away from their home, they are subject instantly to public space where little control is afforded to them. As Weisman stated, anonymity becomes a moot point. Our public space is riddled with harmful expressions, inappropriate behavior, and other unpredictable, unchecked and potentially detrimental variables.

In a recent article in Esquire UK, journalist Finlay Renwick interviewed and participated in Kezia Noble's boot camp style workshop on dating and seduction. Apparently Noble is the "world's leading female seduction coach." Despite the attempt at objectivity, Renwick's article leaned more on the side of skepticism of seduction. Not only are these participants–predominantly men–spending an exorbitant amount of money, they are learning how to be social, less awkward, and charming. During Noble's seminar, the participants are asked to memorize a mnemonic as a way to remember specific elements when speaking to women.

Focus

Authority

Compliment

Empathy

Safety

Although traditional cisgender, straight male PUA tactics such as negging (which involves insulting a woman to capture her attention and intentionally making her feel less than) are not taught during the seminar, a PUA course taught by a woman remains disconcerting. The fact remains – courses with a demand and necessitating facilitation and encouraging control of women – speak to the overall systemic issues within global patriarchy and capitalism.

In Angela Washko's The Game: The Game, an important aspect deeply affecting how women and men interact in public spaces is language. Renwick states,

Like many subcultures, the jargon woven into the culture and dogma of pick-up is a scattered patois of acronyms and colloquialisms, constantly evolving. Groups of women are 'sets', appearance and fitness is known as 'outer game'. 'Pawning' is to use a woman who you are not genuinely interested in as 'social proof', social proof being a popular psychology term relating to humans desiring that which is desired by others - in this case, a woman wanting you because she's seen that another already does. The list goes on. (2)

While environmental and architectural space cannot be modified at one's whim, language assists us in navigating through space. The vernacular of the PUA space creates an insular community, and the terminology sits far too snugly within the parameters of heteronormative, misogynistic behavior. While Noble and her instructors may encourage a man to focus, exude authority, pay compliments, show empathy, and instill safety, the undercurrent of these tactics perpetuates men to find the capacity and bravado to control these variables.

In The Game: The Game, there is no incentive for the player. It is not meant to be a ludic experience where one is rewarded for a particular action or task completed. Rather, the game is meant to be meta-critical. The game is meant to show an aspect of how one gains power over another within a space or environment. The eerie yet striking composition by Xiu Xiu amplifies the tension of the simulated interaction. The music playing throughout the game heightens, as opposed to supplements, the feelings a player might experience in these hypothetical situations. With each measure of music, the game becomes even more irrefutable in its attempt to show the treacherous nature of language within public space. The digital interface also enables an atypical role-playing for any player regardless of sexual orientation, gender, or sex. The game forces and pushes towards dialogue, not against it. It requires one to be uncomfortable and sit with discomfort. Despite the nature of the interactions, the game warrants multiple playthroughs out of sheer curiosity for different outcome in the hopes of something redeeming that never quite presents itself.

Despite the success of Kezia Noble's aforementioned bootcamp dating and seduction workshop, it doesn't lend itself well to the overall dialogue of dispelling PUAs. Rather, it plays at the root of patriarchy and veils the desire many men seek in any environment, and, sometimes, at any cost - power. Washko's game subjects the player to strategies marketed as "proven" to work by well-known PUAs. The Game: The Game delves deep into the insidious nature of how language can be laborious, harmful, and destructive. ■ (1) Leslie Kanes Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 69. (2) Finlay Renwick, “What It's Like To Attend A 'Pick Up Artist' Class Run By A Woman” (Esquire UK, 2017), http://www.esquire.co.uk/life/sex-relationships/longform/a14154/female-pick-up-artist/

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, editor, and curator whose research interests include new media, digital art, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco, and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Real Life Magazine, VICE Motherboard, and SF MOMA's Open Space. She has lectured at the De Young museum, Stanford University, School of Visual Arts, and more. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture.

This essay was written for the exhibition Angela Washko | The Game: The Game 2.0 at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. On view September 15–December 9, 2017, Tuesday–Saturday, 12–5pm. The gallery is free and open to the public. Stills: Angela Washko, The Game: The Game. Ren’Py application. Soundtrack by Xiu Xiu. 2015-2017.

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In memory of Tony Conrad

In memory of Tony Conrad (March 7, 1940 – April 9, 2016), we’d like to share one of his most astute essays, on the challenges and opportunities of installing video artwork in white box gallery settings. It was originally published in the 1997, as part of the 10th Anniversary Issue of The Squealer, a journal that Squeaky regularly published between 1985 and 2010. Tony was one of Squeaky Wheel’s founders, serving on our board and advisory committee until his passing last year. We are grateful for his presence throughout our 32 year history, where he helped co-found our organization, co-found The Squealer, co-found Squeaky Wheel’s public access TV show AxleGrease (which continues under the name ArtGrease), introduced generations of students to Squeaky Wheel, and ceaselessly contributed to our community with his work, his time, his enthusiasm. We remember him fondly, and he is missed, treasured. You can download a pdf of the essay here. Conrad, Tony. “People Will Come If The Pictures Move: New Opportunities in Video Installation Art.” The Squealer. Volume 12, Issue 2, Spring/Summer 1997: Published by Squeaky Wheel, Page 29-31. 

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Figure vs. Ground, White vs. Black (Blue)

by Soyoung Yoon

Sondra Perry: flesh out. Installation view. Photo by Kevin Kline. The following essay by Soyoung Yoon refers to works as they were presented in Resident Evil, Sondra Perry’s exhibition in The Kitchen (nyc) Resident Evil in the Fall of 2016. Perry’s exhibition at Squeaky Wheel, flesh out, mutates many of the same materials and thoughts as the previous exhibit. Wall 2 is a re-rendering of her titular two-screen installation Resident Evil; Ashes for Three Monitor Workstation is a continuation of Graft and Ash for Three Monitor Workstation; netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 2.0 is the latest in an ongoing series; and Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhon Coming On: Fields is a further examination into Turner’s The Slave Ship, here installed in our window space without the rowing machine that accompanied it in The Kitchen. Sondra Perry: flesh out is on View through April 1, 2017. Gallery hours are Tue-Sat, 12-5pm. This exhibition is free and open to the general public.

“And in the theater, I want to change my seat; Just so I can step onto everybody’s feet”[1]: We could argue that the artist Sondra Perry offers another type of modern exhibition space to display her moving images — from the black box of the cinema, the white cube of the gallery or museum, to now “the blue room.” The walls of the gallery are painted a bright, matte shade of blue, precisely, chroma-key blue, citing a post-production technique primarily for removing and replacing a blue or green screen with a different background. In Perry’s blue room, there is also a Roomba vacuum-cleaner, which carries on its back a set of photocopied zines of theoretical texts; it circles the space of the gallery, moving in-between artworks and at times brushing up against or bumping into our feet. After seeing Perry’s exhibition, we might be reminded of the “rogue Roomba” that switched itself on, rolled onto a hot place, and set itself ablaze; reports spoke of the smoke damage—“everything is black” —which forced its owners out of their home.[2]

   The reference to the chroma-key blue of digital world-making speaks to fantasies of space travel: the possibility of positioning a subject against any background, in any space, every space, particularly amidst the darkness of the night or of outer space. The blue screen, because of its low-luminosity, functions as an especially effective placeholder for the black void of space, its infinite nothingness. However, the possibilities of this technique depend upon the sharpness of the contrast between the subject in the foreground and the background, that is, upon the subject’s capacity to separate and define itself as a figure against the ground. Recent scholarship attests to the historic instability of photographing or filming dark skin in color.[3] The very technology of color photography had been developed with white skin as norm, blowing out the varying tones and textures of darker skin, rendering it at times indivisible from the background, as if the illegibility of blackness was but a technical error. Technology is ideology. In Perry’s netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr series, the chroma-key blue also appears as “the blue screen of death,” a Window’s operating system’s system crash, superimposed with references to “the blue wall of silence,” the unwritten code that police offers do not report on each other, via tactics of intimidation, harassment, false testimony, and silence — a fatal system error that is not so much an aberration as a constitutive necessity of the system as such.

Sondra Perry. Ashes for Three Monitor Workstation (2017). Photo by Kevin Kline.         

   Subject vs. Background. Figure vs. Ground. White vs. Black (Blue)…What then of subjectivities — and bodies — that do not seem to possess the stabilized configuration of an “I”? What then for the figure that is diffuse, diasporic, both one and many, localized in neither a body or an identity?    

   In Perry’s work, the difficult, fraught relation to this “I” is evidenced through the precarity of black bodies, brought (again) to national attention through the circulation of videotaped police violence as in the killing of Eric Garner or Korryn Gaines, which followed years of prosaic surveillance, repeated stop-and-searches, relentless, arbitrary harassment for small-scale infractions. To watch, however, is not necessarily to witness, and Perry underscores the heavy price of witnessing, the weight born by those with the absolute necessity to record — and to share. In 1994, in view of the Rodney King video, Elizabeth Alexander wrote of the spectacle of black bodies in pain as a national tradition, staged primarily for and by white people; she adds, “but in one way or another, black people also have been looking.”[4] For Alexander, emphasis is on the function of this looking and how it constitutes the knowledge of violence and her vulnerability to it, the certainty of “it would be my turn next”— a bodily experience that comes to reside in “the flesh” as shared forms of memory, of history, of the lived experience of becoming/being black in this country. As part of Resident Evil, a centerpiece of Perry’s exhibition, there is a video playing on a TV monitor on top of a piece of living room furniture. The video begins with an audio interview with Ramsey Orta, who recorded Garner’s death on video in 2014; the reporter comments on the steadiness of Orta’s hand, which remains remarkably steady, firm, unwavering, despite the distressing intimacy of the scene (“took my life from me, took my friend’s life from me”). Perry’s video ends with an audio of Gaines narrating her own impending death over Facebook and Instagram in 2016; “record everything,” we hear Gaines say to her five-year old son. This is layered over a scrolling text that recounts an episode from Perry’s own childhood, which eerily echoes the scene of Gaines’s death. The daily strain of such proximity to premature death, its utter normalcy, collapses pronouns as well as verbal tenses: that would be me, that is me.

   In the Resident Evil video, if a walk home at night turns into the horror of stalking/being stalked, scored to excerpted soundtracks of Alien and Predator, the “evil” that awaits in the living room is none other than the glorious Eartha Kitt: “I wanna be evil, little evil me; Just as mean and evil as I can be.” In Perry’s work, there is not only the burden of the necessity to record and to share, but also the exuberance, the black joy, of this existence through sharing. Via her Roomba zines, Perry refers to the proposal for a new measure of virality, indeed promiscuity, for evaluating images, what the artist Hito Steyerl calls a “defense of the poor image”: the image that is valued for the “velocity, intensity, spread” of its circulation, exemplified in the ludic velocity of this Roomba, appropriated as a purveyor of critical intervention underfoot.[5] The zine also references the critic Aria Dean’s comparison of the circulation of the poor image, especially as memes via social media, to what Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism would describe as the collective being of blackness (“ontological totality”); against the surveillance of black bodies and desires, Dean asks, “perhaps we can make ourselves opaque, through our own serial, iterative excess.”[6] As part of Resident Evil, behind the TV monitor, against the chroma-key blue wall, we also see a 3-D animation of an extreme close-up of Perry’s skin; the projection is scaled to the massive proportions of a history painting or a Jackson Pollock. The close-up presents her skin as a diffusive figure, a dispersed scattering that is also a fusing, like lava flow, rock become throbbing, heaving liquid at over 1300 degrees Fahrenheit. Perry’s skin, that overdetermined site for the “fact” of blackness, becomes flesh, in all its fluidity, viscosity, and sensuality of being; it spills over, spreads out and in ceaseless movement, constantly folding into/out of the background, rendering the ground itself into a figure of sorts. The ground moves, like the sea. In the video for Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhon coming on for a Three Monitor Workstation, Perry animates an extreme close-up of the sea in J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting of the Zong massacre from 1781, where the British slave ship Zong’s captain drowned 133 slaves in order to claim compensation for these “goods” under the salvage clause of the ship’s insurance policy. (Another ten slaves threw themselves overboard in what the ship’s captain later described as an act of defiance.) Through the animating close-up, Perry draws out the texture of brush strokes, the swell and dissipation of waves, the morph, warp, mutation of the sea-as-flesh, the blur.

  To see videos such as Wet and Wavy Looks, we sit in rowing machines, exercise bikes, or treadmills, advertised as three monitor workstations, but here transformed into infernal machines from which to view Perry’s videos. The machines have ill-fitting seats, the pedals are flipped, and the effort to produce “a healthier, better you” is further impeded by Eco Styler hair styling gel, as if the underscore the fatigue — and futility — of the desire to be a productive subject of capital, a good subject of the state. Indeed, it is the very philosophy of policing behavior (“broken windows theory”), which has been the motor for expanding the scope and intensity of the surveillance of particular communities, exposing the entire community to a harsh, punitive light, where every move, every gesture could become probable cause.[7] “I wanna be evil,” we hear Kitt sing. We could also recall Bertolt Brecht’s description of a police chief’s fitful dreaming, where, amidst the hallucinatory fumes of fear and bad conscience, the tentative stirrings of the people are envisioned as a flood: “Once it has begun, it never ceases…they fill everything, like water, they seep through everything, like water, they have no substance. Of course, the police throw themselves against them, of course, batons are flying, but what’s this? They strike right through the bodies…”[8] In Perry’s blue room, we begin to ascertain the force, the urgency of that flood.

[1] Eartha Kitt, “I Want to be Evil,” Youtube video, 3:02 minutes, posted by mrfnk on Nov.16, 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS02GeKuWQ4, included in video for Sondra Perry’s moving image installation Resident Evil (2016).

[2] “Robot Suicide? Rogue Roomba Switches Self On, Climbs Onto Hotplate, Burns Up,” Huffington Post, November 13, 2013, updated on January 23, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/13/robot-suicide-roomba-hotplate-burns-up_n_4268064.html

[3] See, for instance, Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication vol. 34, no. 1 (2009), 111-136.

[4] Elizabeth Alexander, “Can you be BLACK and Look at This?”: Reading the Rodney King Video(s), Public Culture 1994, no 7, pp.77-94.

[5] Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” e-flux no. 24 (April 2011), re-printed in Perry’s Roomba zine; see also Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux no. 10 (Nov. 2009) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

[6] Aria Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Real Life, July 25, 2016, re-printed in Perry’s Roomba zine

[7] Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, Verso Books, 2017.

[8] Bertolt Brecht, “The Bruise-A Threepenny Film” in Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. by Marc Silberman, Brecht on Film & Radio (Bloomsbury. 2000), 142-3.

Soyoung Yoon is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. She is also a Visiting Faculty at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program [isp].

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Troubled Sunshine of the Joyful Mind

by Monika Bakke

Kathy High, Cloned Positions (2003)

Science fiction is not science future in the techno-scientifically inspired art projects of Kathy High. Works such as Trans-Tomagotchi (2008-2012), Skin-to-skin Dome (2009), as well as Cloned Positions and Red Scare from the Soft Science (2003) series all share the same attitude, something Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”, which “requires learning to be truly present.”[1] As expressions of “respons-ability”, these works involve “multispecies players” in search of the best way “to get on together”, requiring not only vigilance in a techno-scientific environment, but also truly inventive play linked with work that needs to get done.

It was in this mode of “response-ability” that in 2003 – the same year Dolly the sheep was euthanized and the Human Genome Project came to completion – that Kathy High produced her works Cloned Positions and Red Scare. Both belong to the Soft Science series, situated in the middle of a fierce, emerging ideological and political battle over the use of biomedical technologies in the US. Red Scare, a video-sculpture work making verbal and visual references to Cold War hysteria over an imagined threat, as the artist declared, “reflects the possibilities of (eu)genetic selection” and the fear of contamination in the context of The President’s Council on Bioethics initiated by George W. Bush in 2001. The outcome of these ideologically driven scares, both in the 1950s and early years of this century, was a growing conservatism that resulted in compromising civil liberties. Unfounded fears of subversive elements creating anticipations of contaminating agents, correlate in High’s Red Scare with hopelessness, confusion, and futile attempts to escape.

Human cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, published in 2002, was the first of seven reports issued by The President’s Council on Bioethics. This document and speeches by G.W. Bush on the topic of biomedicine mixed religious faith and politics, setting up the context for Cloned Positions, a science fantasy referring in a playful way to nonsexual and sexual modes of reproduction in humans and plants. In the video, scenes of naked female clones caressing each other and themselves alternate with footage of plants’ genitals, i.e. flowers, some of which are caught in the cross-species sexual act of pollination by insects. While the human clones seem to confirm that “female sexuality resists knowledges that seek clear-cut, definitive borders, boundaries, organ, pleasures,”[2] the plants’ queer sexuality provides further inspiration for thinking about sexual relations in human and nonhuman contexts in terms of the morphological complexity of their sex organs (many flowers are hermaphroditic) and sexual strategies involving not just other plant species, but also the wind, water, gravity and animals. Plant sexuality, like female sexuality, “is an open system,”[3] which by no means can be reduced to heterosexual unions between two partners (organs); in flowers, for example, the female reproductive organ is often accompanied by numerous male reproductive organs.

Kathy High, Skin-to-Skin Dome (2009)

This repertoire of bodily encounters with unexpected others is extended to lab animals in High’s work Skin-to-skin Dome, which in a playful manner addresses the reciprocal need in rats and humans for joyous exploration of tactile interactions between them. Skin-to-skin Dome is meant to be a prototype of a vivarium where sensory enrichment can be practiced by both animal technicians and the animals themselves. These otherwise improbable encounters are supposed to, despite the hardship of lab life for animals, evoke fleeting moments of joy, resulting in the well being of both rats and humans. On the one hand, they help ease animal suffering; on the other, they prevent compassion fatigue, common among animal facility personnel. Vivaria are a troubling but inherent part of bio-medical research practices, hence the obligation for the encouragement of all kinds, no matter how unexpected and improbable the moments of mutual joy.

Kathy High. Trans-Tomagotchi (2008-2012)

Developed out of her acclaimed work Embracing Animal (2004-2006), where the artist interacted with real transgenic rats, Trans-Tomagotchi rats emerge in silico thus making contact with more people than lab personnel. They are artificial life, but also creatures with real affective powers designed to enhance public “respons-ability” for transgenic animals living in biomedical labs. Rather than being a classic Tamagotchi – a handheld egg-shaped digital pet, Trans-tomagotchi is a website declaring to provide a platform for sick people to relate to sick research animals that serve as models of their diseases, or to animals used in xeno-transplantations; the website also offers information about transgenic procedures and their functions in animals. While animals designed to be sick in bio-medical labs are workers deeply hidden from the public eye, releasing Trans-Tomagotchi rats to the public to become virtual pets requiring special care serves the purpose of urging humans to respond to the everyday ordeal of autoimmune diseases possibly shared with them.

        As Haraway writes, and High shows, “eschewing futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively.”[4]

[1] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

[2] Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 213.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 4.

Monika Bakke writes on contemporary art and aesthetics, with a particular focus on posthumanist, gender and cross-species perspectives. She works in the Philosophy Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. The author of two books: Bio-transfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010, in Polish) and Open Body (2000, in Polish), co-author of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics (2004, in Polish), Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006) and The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011). Since 2001 she has been an editor of the Polish cultural journal Czas Kultury (Time of Culture).

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Kathy High speaking about her practice

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Kathy High. Kathy is Bowie. 2015 part of Soft Science: Science Fictions by Kathy High On view till Jan 10, 2017.