Controlling the flow of information has become a significant feature of our current lives. Ranging from the personal decision one makes about what information to post online to the on-going efforts of governments and agencies to manage and restrict the release or accessibility of certain information to the public.
Be Seeing You is an installation consisting of two videos, one a small excerpt from the other, which explore notions of both the coercion to offer personal information and late capitalisms embrace of the technology that allows the mining of such details to facilitate every waking moment as a financially contracted transaction.
The installed works take inspiration from the 60’s cult science-fiction British television programme “The Prisoner,” and focuses on “Rover” – an animated object, typical of early lo-fi science fiction, used by the authorities to intimidate residents of “the village”.
Treating the collection of appropriated footage in a way more akin to a research project, the film: "Be Seeing You" explores the multiple perspectives afforded by film technology, and touches on relations between the audience and projected image.
The emphasis on an experiential encounter with video that speaks perhaps of an authentic physiological experience, is complicated by the slippage that occurs between audio and visual affects, and the relentlessly hypnotic affect of the pulsing light.
The accompanying video, "Eye-Technics", 2012 (mini single screen digital video work with sound, duration: 0.53 min, looped), presented in a periscope plinth, is a parodic take on the mechanism of the eye itself.
The exhibition at The Container is also launching Clarke’s new publication, “UN-PUBLISH” (2012) which will be available to visitors free-of-charge (distributed by Banner Repeater, London).
The publication, outlining online and SMS conversations between Bradley Manning and Zak Antaloupe, Adrian Lamo, and an imagined communique with Julian Assange, refers to an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Assange where the authorities re-management of information is addressed as “un-publishing”.
This process of deleting information in an effort to “rewrite” history is of course not a new notion and recalls of the early 20th century “purges” of the Soviet Union where thousands of photographs were re-appropriated; or more recently the efforts of China, North Korea or Arab Spring countries to control what people see or post. It is ironic that the American government, who so adamantly condemned this activity of the Soviet Union during the cold war, is entangled in the most publicized effort in history to rewrite the news.
Ami Clarke will be giving also an artist talk, discussing the exhibition and the publication.
About the artist and her art works
Ami Clarke is an artist whose practice often involves working with appropriated material. During extensive periods of research she responds to the material she finds mindful of the contributory factors of where and how the material she is drawn to is found.
Treating the collection of appropriated footage in a way more akin to a research project, the film: "Be Seeing You" explores the multiple perspectives afforded by film technology, and touches on relations between the audience and projected image.
The immersive environment creates a visual equivalent of certain kinds of auditory stimulation, an aural world, as M. McLuhan noted "the ear favours no particular "point of view"... "we are all enveloped by sound".
The emphasis on an experiential encounter with video that speaks perhaps of an authentic physiological experience whilst viewing, is complicated by the slippage that occurs between audio and visual affects, and the relentlessly hypnotic affect of the pulsing light.
The humour in the repeated 'takes', suggests a multitude of possibilities:
"Humour as a system of communications and as a problem of our environment - of what’s really going on ... does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. Today’s humour, on the contrary, has no story line - no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay of stories."
In a separate work she considers Julian Assange’s comments in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, where the affect of data/news being deleted from the internet, without anyone really noticing it has happened, is described as 'un-publishing'. In this way what was understood, briefly, as 'news', simply disappears.
The publication takes the premise of 'unaccountability' relating to the data stream found in this way on the internet, and more generally, the way in which there can be little certainty re data management, with the advent of digital media, to exact a broad license with the content material in her own artists publication, a 16-page text and visual work, free to take away from the exhibition.
Assange mentions that perhaps it is less difficult in the traditional print media of newspapers, to vanish away such unwanted news, as its material form will potentially still exist with a broad distribution of the paper.
