Black Box by Sreshta PremnathPhantom Moon2 channel video installation and sound scripts culled from news reports, documentaries and written by the artist.
In "Phantom Moon," the first photograph of the earth as seen from the moon is transformed into a 'seascape' of Halftone dots as a camera scans over it. This disorienting video is juxtaposed with a slide projection as a camera circumambulates the model blue whale displayed at the New York Natural History Museum. In addition to these visual elements, audio scripts (taken from news reports, documentaries and written by the artist) simultaneously play like echoes or dreams and keep reframing this juxtaposition. Four and a half billion years ago the shattered fragments of the earth recombined to form the moon. Circling us, it appears night after night, affecting the cycles of the body and mind. The compounds found on the surface of the moon fully correspond to those found on earth, and yet Neil Armstrong described its dead surface as grey and powdery, like ash. The moon is the obsession of the romantic, it symbolizes the virgin and is seen as the archetypal object of desire, but when we reach its surface we find that it is barren. It was from the vantage of this floating 'phantom limb' of the earth that we first saw an image of our own planet in its entirety. As predicted by an op-ed column from 1966, this image has become ubiquitous in our time, as if it were an obvious fact we had seen with our own eyes. We have accepted the eye of the camera as our own and the photograph as the fixed perspective of reality. While, in our daily lives we experience this infinitely fascinating and contradictory earth only in glimpses, we simultaneously imagine it - project it - in its entirety. In Laszlo Krasznahorkai's novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" we are presented with the protagonist who encounters the body of a Whale. One of the audio tracks describes this encounter. As he circumambulates this enormous being he realizes that "seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight", since to comprehend all its parts itself "appeared a singularly hopeless task." What fascinates him most is his inability to understand the very fact that this creature "had witnessed the wonders of an infinitely strange and infinitely distant world." A central contradiction of our reality is the fact that our intimate experiences in the world are of a fleeting, fragmentary, ambiguous nature, whereas our knowledge (understanding) of situations appears to be all-encompassing. If the function of photographs is to attempt to - pretend to - collapse the distance between "our" reality and the camera's ahistoric eye, then maybe the photograph has to be destroyed or unraveled to reveal the irreconcilability of this reality. One of the audio scripts voices this contrary desire to fracture rather than conflate, through the admissions of a man who desires an amputation. Here one in invited to contemplate this desire to fracture what is presented as whole and to attempt to see the entirety of that which is experienced as fragmentary and contingent. Is it not in the vacillating field of this irreconcilability that our perceptions lie? ContrabandThree aluminum trunks containing indigenous medicinal plant species, 'Grow Lamps' to facilitate plant growth in sun-less conditions, bio piracy fact sheets. Bangalore is often called "the garden city of India" because of the several gardens and greenhouses that date back to its early days of colonization. The city's cool temperature, dryness and the abundance of water allowed the British to use it as a midway point in the dissemination of plants around India. The plants and trees brought from Britain would first arrive in Bangalore to be acclimatized and then sent to other parts of the country. Small landscapes like this were being uprooted and moved in boxes from one country to another in order to make the colonizers' assumed home seem closer to their original home. Consider the great contemporary controversy surrounding Intellectual Property Rights wherein large western agricultural and pharmaceutical companies are trying to patent plant and animal genes that have been traditionally used in third world countries for millennia. This time natural resources of distant social groups are being hijacked by a few large corporations for their own economic gains. It is in examining this strange trafficking of nature and the fixing of its ownership that I am interested. This landscape "in transit" serves as a kind of island that is neither here nor there, a space of ambiguity where ownership is as yet undecided. Freedom of the Seas5 digital composite prints constructed out of images mined from Flickr.com associated with the cruise ship "Freedom of the Seas". Freedom of the Seas is 237 feet tall and 1,112 feet long with 15 passenger decks. A three-level dining room seats 2,140. There are more than 2,000 deck chairs and an ice-skating rink. The fitness center measures 9,700 square feet and includes a boxing ring. The spa provides luxuries from teeth whitening to massages and a 13th-floor deck offers a rock climbing wall and a big wave pool with simulated surfing.
Vessels from five European Union nations have launched sea patrols in an attempt to combat illegal immigration. The operation, codenamed Ulysses, is aimed at stopping the gangs that bring immigrants on dangerous sea voyages from Africa.
The cruise ship is a strange case of the special sovereignty afforded to non-national commercial territory. It fuses the safety, self-segregation and control of a suburban, gated community (or the well-policed borders of wealthy nations) with the duty free desires of global capitalism. To those who are allowed the privilege of cruising, the world becomes a theme park, as they sail from port to port across nations, taking in the spectacle: ethnic food is served up for sampling, native goods are sold as souvenirs, local people and local scenes are photographed to share online, to post on travel blogs, and to illustrate memoirs on self-discovery and authentic experience. To the global, neo-liberal Flaneur the world offers itself up as a spectacle for consumption. The analogy, noted by Hegel, between eating and imbibing knowledge is literalized in the rhetoric of the global Flaneur. It is impossible however to ignore the fact that the spectacle of globalization can only be viewed as a success from the safe distance of the self-enclosed, economically privileged bubble of the metaphorical "cruise ship". We only have to look at the case of immigrants fleeing various African nations, who perish on their sea route to the tightly guarded borders of the European Union to comprehend the one-sidedness of this view. This one-sided world-view is, however, concretized by the ubiquity of travel photography found online: from the totalizing view of Google Earth, which is seamlessly interfaced with sites such as Panoramio and Flickr, allowing you to "explore the world" and "show your favorite places", to personal travel albums offered up by members of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. In a world awash in (constructed by?) photographic representation, how is one to investigate the photographic image? How is one to engage the tourist photograph when one's very tools of engagement are self-reflexively encoded? Is the matrix of representation totalizing or are there modes of rupture that allow for the "real" to emerge or invade it? Sreshta Premnath 11/08/07 |
