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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathCollective Bodies
 
Drive (Crandall, Jordan), 1998Conversation Map (Sack, Warren), 1997Need_X_Change (Daniel, Sharon), 1998
 
 
 

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new and unsuspected categories. The results at times resemble a narrative segment, but that is another «accident» in this overview of a life in images, both «flattening» a life lived in images and providing a sublime vision of its hidden links and affinities.

Collectivities seen from the appropriate distance have a grandeur that can be overwhelming. In «Drive» Jordan Crandall is concerned with a militaristic and corporate sublime. Crandall describes «Drive» as «a seven-part video installation that combines traditional cinema with military tracking, identifying, and targeting technologies.» The cinematic is contradicted and displaced and one senses that am entirely different social order is expressed in this shift from concerns with onscreen realism and narrative to a more predatory relation of the camera to the world. The image is there to be processed and manipulated in service of a voracious gaze that marks itself as a target into the screen image. The screen responds, coming alive with machines in motion and groups and parts of bodies in rhythm. The visual technics of domination have the strange and disturbing capacity to produce what Crandall calls «erotic couplings between humans

 

and machines.» Throngs of machine/human assemblages are sublime, beyond vision and comprehension without computional support. Thus, the same support that maintains the military and megacorporations is made available to art.» [27]

Mapping Cyborg Bodies: Warren Sack

Warren Sack’s «Conversation Map» (1997—ongoing) is a «graphical browser» for very large scale conversations such as listserves and newsgroups. It maps social networks or who is corresponding with whom, themes of discussion and the semantic network of synonyms or metaphors. Exchanges and contents that would otherwise be too large to comprehend or summarize are made rational and comprehensible.

Access and Subjectification: Sharon Daniel

The full implications of ‹access› to the voiceless and indigent are seldom taken seriously in art. What would it take to make the web accessible to Sister Other? Sharon Daniel’s project «Need_X_Change» (1998—ongoing) is both a collaboration with Casa Segura, an HIV prevention and needle exchange

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