DANMite,karl /210 /project 2.0
Describe karl / 210 /project2.0 here.
Lebensraum
The lebensraum is an interactive ‘living space’ of history, memory, and symbols that engages the issues of historical construction and its entangled relation with political discourse, social identity, and individual memory.
Through the analysis of historical reconstruction and real time news events, the epistemological issues of representation will be explored along with the manipulation of the ‘real’ sense of experiencing these moments and how they affect viewers and shape their understanding of the past. Moreover, the political manipulation of historical facts and references will be aggressively critiqued in order to provide or inspire a more critical view of history within the viewer. An obvious example of the continuing trend of historical conjuring and manipulation can be seen in the historically based propaganda of Kim Jong Il, as one poster is of a US Soldier in Korean War attire dropping a baby into a well; but also the fact that Sarah Palin claimed in the vice presidential debate that she wants to ensure Israel that there wouldn’t be another Holocaust. Both of these highlight the ways in which historical symbols, visual and linguistic, are used to pull the unconscious strings of those who experienced or identify with a specific historical period or phenomena.
At the same time, the emphasis on analyzing a US perspective or “American consciousness” especially within the last two decades will call into question the linearity of those histories and their effects on our current world, as well as the absence of other equally important histories that allude popular culture and discourse. In this sense then the viewer will be given the opportunity to not only think critically about history in political discourse but also how they’ve come to understand history and the development of their US-centered western world view. These insights and questions will then be articulated during their interviews with the stationary camera, in the second of the two spaces, allowing the viewer to become an agent of memory and history, collaborating with the piece's own investigation.
This exhibition seeks to expand upon the limitations of disciplinized film and video practices. On one hand the usage of interactive interviews and nonlinear imaging structures opens the formal and theoretical limitations of documentary, which is often overly didactic in its portrayal of its information and its relationship to the viewer. On the other hand, the immense analysis of past and current political issues and the deconstruction of historical symbols realign video art from an often conceptual and formalist practice towards an accessible, socially functional and politically engaging one.
The development of a new critical and ‘postmodern’ history has arisen in response to the seemingly impossible destructive scope of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour are two of the greatest examples of modernist or postmodern films that begin to engage the difficulties of rationalizing and incorporating such world changing events into a critical and reflexive historical discourse. Simultaneously, within experimental cinema, works of Bruce Conner (from 1958-2008) and Craig Baldwin (beginning in 1977) have created complexly woven montages of archival or found footage to question master narratives of US military history and popular culture. Through the inspiration of these filmmakers, I will expand upon their earlier assumptions and productions to create a more interactive and new media based piece, which shall also be highly founded in theoretical texts that question not only the formal aspects of the visual medium but also the social and political aspects of the content.
Throughout the structuring of the piece, fundamental formalistic and theoretical works will establish a foundation of the moving images as well as the space itself, analyzing theories of poststructuralist linguistic, postmodernist history, and contemporary concepts on interactivity. While the content will be fueled by a wide array of historically important philosophers and epochs, used to construct a sense of a narrative thread or master discourse of western history and thought, which will be visually deconstructed and recontextualized. For theoretical support I shall base my work upon the inspirational writings of the poststructuralists Roland Brathes, Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze, the postmodern historians and social theorist Hayden White and Michel Foucault.
The initial emphasis on linguistic theory will help to develop the formalistic capabilities of video based art work and symbolic construction; while the postmodern theories aid in developing a critical discourse of the project, not merely in relation to its content but also a self-critical discourse of its own existence. Because of the political and moral issues of any conjuring of history and claims of validity in regard to such large and undefinable subject matter, my own subjectivity will have to be in constant question and reflexivity.
Moreover, the emphasis on a largely white male western history enables a space to critique and dismantle such a history, while also perpetuating its dominance as the central subject of the study. Yet, the possible co-opting of other’s histories in order to place them within the context of a project created by a white male of western and privileged descent, who is largely educated by the theories of other white male western thinkers, may in fact undermine the socio-political agendas of those other or marginalized groups. Therefore, such self-criticism and reflexivity must be carefully taken into account during the creation of this project.
The reflexivity of the agent/viewer within the space itself though is the final concern of theoretical analyses of history in subjectivity, memory, and identity. In many ways, the project will be emphasized and positively restricted by the emphasis on an American consciousness or subjectivity, in which European history is that of influence and language, while African and South American history is that of the other and the exploited. Thus, the emphasis of ‘American consciousness or subjectivity will limit the infinite scope of such a project while focusing on deconstructing and critiquing the social and historical identities of the project maker and its participants.
The contemporary theoretical and formal issues of new media and participatory exhibitionist art must be explored and expanded upon in order to place the piece within the contemporary discussions of the project’s formal kinship, outside of the film and video. This will be largely fulfilled through critical analysis; but if possible, interviews would be done with contemporary artist or theorist that deal with similar topics of historical agency and subjectivity, especially within new media. This interviews then will be incorporated into the final video product within the space itself, but also the final meta-documentary of compiled interviews done during the pre-exhibition space and then those from the space itself, within the second room.
The triggered interviews of exhibition participants will largely be coupled with US events and experiences, but also supplemented with lesser known images in order to call into question our grasps on history and the responses of those faced with this overwhelming sense of the unknown. Ideally though, the extended viewing of the larger critical and somewhat randomized historical montage piece in the central room will inspire commentary and reaction in some verbal form. The absence of any response though is equally indicative of an endemic and possibly automatic aversion to historical participation and discussion.
Therefore, these human responses are in a many ways the ends of the means, in terms of not only a project based upon individual research but also one that continues a somewhat social psychology structure of a controlled experiment. Also, the large number of interviews that will be based upon a wide array of US born and foreign citizens from around the bay area, will help to develop more personal narratives that will interject the function of the individual agent within the onslaught of historical images and sounds of the initial and central montaged video piece. The creation of a video based blog for compiling written accounts and poetic testimonies will also help supplement the work, utilizing these words for the running historical images within the second space.
Bibliography
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Delueze, Giles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. London: Athlone Press, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover Publications, 1956.
Mehan, Hugh, Charles E. Nathanson, and James M. Skelly. Nuclear Discourse in the 1980s: The Unravelling Conventions of the Cold War. Discourse Society 1990; Volume 1: 133-165.
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Skoller, Jeffrey. Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005.
Thomas, Dan and Larry R. Baas. Ronald Reagan in the Public Mind. Political Psychology; Vol. 14, No.1 (Mar. 1993): 55-75.
White, Hayden. The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987.