Describe karl / 210 /project3.0 here.
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.
Throughout the course of modern history, the development of indexical and filmic technologies has profoundly changed the epistemological and phenomenological relationship between individuals and historical events. Moreover the expansion of digital communication technologies has altered the possibilities of an illusion of direct experience and construction of those events themselves. The Persian Gulf War for example has largely been characterized as a war in which, through mass media outlets, was experienced in an illusionary simultaneity or ‘real-time’, in which the US and Western populations could live the events themselves as they unfolded through technological extensions and prosthetic memories.
Yet, the experience of the war itself was largely confined to an absence of human bodies, a series of symbolic objects of power that violently interacted in a ‘surgically’ precise exercise of technomilitary power. This new perceived process of military intervention and excursion was largely among a rhetoric of which insured the US public, and the world, that “this is not going to be another Vietnam” as President George HW Bush claimed in his public address in 1990. Rather, this intervention was what Bush claimed was a developing “New World Order…governed by the laws of the State and not the rule of the Jungle”, which could be perceived as a new unified and more efficient global body of judicial power, with the support of the UN.
Therefore, the Persian Gulf War will act as the historical locus to which will spiral outward to previous Reagan military interventions as well as the current administration’s infrastructural and socio-cultural intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. The role then of media technologies in constructing these events (or their absence) shall be addressed, especially within the relation of the political and ideological rhetoric to which they support or contradict. The current video technologies available to US soldiers (and Iraqi civilians) now is especially crucial in understanding the contemporary generation’s ability to construct history from an individual level, and to what extent levels of agency are possible within the current cyberstructure of communication technologies.
Furthermore, concurrent events, such as the Rodney King beating (during the Persian Gulf) will be explored also, as media phenomena that created fissions within the cold projections of state power, exposing the physical violence of the marginalized Other, while exemplifying the possibilities of personal agency provided through video technology. The absence of the bodily and personal experience must be addressed as a metacritique of mediated history, but also within the specific events themselves. Thus, specific interviews will be performed with soldiers that participated in the first Persian Gulf War, especially those at the Ft. Stewart military base in Richmond Hill, Georgia.
The role of Ft. Stewart within the war itself is specifically important considering the socio-cultural effects it had on the small Southern marsh town, including my own personal childhood. As a 6 year old, I spent hours sketching out visual dioramas of the conflict and inspired to join the military. Thus, the complex interchanges of personal acculturation, experience, and memory must be thoroughly and reflexively analyzed in order to most profoundly conceptualize and express the matrix of historical phenomena within a larger socio-cultural context. The exposure of my own experience and influence will further help to inspire the personal reflection and participation of the viewer/agents within the installation itself.
In order to expand upon the possible sensory and conceptually reflexive limitations of documentary and archival techniques of investigation, the viewer/agent will be able explore the historical referents through a Baghdad "metaverse", of geographical as well as filmic constructions, through an avatar within a contemporary virtual or anachronistic gaming platform. This exhibition thus 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.
Theoretically, 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 participatory 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 specific analyses and representations dealing with the events, theoretical support shall be based upon the inspirational writings of the poststructuralists Roland Brathes, Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze, as well as the postmodern historians and philosophers: Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, 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.
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 pieces within the Baghdad "metaverses" 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.
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Bennett, Stephen Earl. The Persian Gulf War's Impact on American's Political Information. Political Behavior, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 1994): 179-201.
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Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! 5 Essays on September 11 and Related Dates . London: Verso Press, 2002.
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