Jordan Crandall’s 13-minute loop projection (super-8 and 16mm film transferred to DVD), Drive, Track 1, refers to some of the earliest experiments in motion pictures--i.e. Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photography--as well as incorporating some of the most sophisticated, contemporary motion-tracking and imaging technology. Crandall explores the theme of the moving image, grounding it in the recent history of the moving body. “I am interested in how these transformations of the image, of vision, and of the body, mediated by technology, are embroiled in new regimes of fitness, new formats of adequacy,” notes Crandall. “They involve coordinations between bodies, machines, andimages. I like to see the image always in terms of this kind of body-machine-image cluster.” Specifically, what we see in Crandall’s piece are images of a well-toned male body flexing and moving through space, alternated with footage of pedestrians walking on an urban street. Another series of images represent what appears to be a night-time street fight or perhaps some kind of choreographed dance in a sinister-looking back alley. All of these scenes are occasionally interrupted by green lines and contours that overlay the images, recalling the kind of high-tech missile tracking controls familiar from news footage of the Gulf War. Crandall writes:

The video sequences in [Drive, Track 1] look at the phenomenon of movement both in terms of cinema--the set of conventions though which the world of movement has come to be represented--and in terms of new computerized tracking systems. In these latter terms, movement is represented by way of its processing through the mechanisms of the database. The format of the database floats above the cinematic image-field, combining with it to generate a new kind of moving image. Harnessed to new technological assemblages and driven by processing imperatives, these new images do not so much represent movements as track them.

Drive, Track 1 produces compelling conjunctions of desire and paranoia, sensuality and sterility, and public and private space.

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In the early, utopian period of experimentation, telecommunications interfaces were mainly conceived in terms of a possibility to interact with distant partners, opening up new intersubjective freedoms. Today we are faced with the looming reality of the database, informed by technologies of tracking and capable of implementing a multitude of targeting devices and strategies. These technologies, of overwhelmingly military origin, are currently being used for marketing, taking advantage of the multiplication of networked environments where electronic windows both provide and gather information. Jordan Crandall now speaks of a "body-machine-image complex," which structures "a provisional interiority in terms of routings through the body that help to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior."(5) This means that the militarized image sees us, as much or more than we see it; that it informs us in the double sense of the word, extending its stimuli into bodily and psychic intimacy, and remodeling the perceptual and communicational environment on the basis of the information gathered.

It is this active, sighted image that Crandall has attempted to represent in the video installation Drive, first shown at the Neue Galerie of Graz, Austria, in February 2000. Divided into seven "tracks," the installation experiments with multiple presentation media (individual viewing goggles and a portable DVD deck, in addition to wall projections), but above all, with different registration- and analysis-protocols inside the image. The green traceries of movement-tracking software configure around a running body. Coordinate grids appear within images shot from the eyes of smart bombs or missiles. Reddish thermal imaging plays against the eerie green of night-vision video recordings. Certain tracks oscillate between recording formats, for example: a hand-cranked camera using black-and-white film, Hi8 video, a surveillance camera, digital video from a wearable DVcam. Although some of the footage is borrowed (demonstration films from arms manufacturers), the majority of the tracks have been filmed with actors under Crandall's direction. Perhaps the most succesful follows a woman through passive-aggressive sexual scenarios, mirror and telephone scenes, and into the molded seats of a sensual automobile ­ with the camera inciting, configuring, and registering the drives. Another track stages the permutating subject-positions of a fantasmatic matrix, based on Freud's case-study, "A Child is Being Beaten." Gunshots, explosions, sounds of slapping flesh, voices and the pulses of light sink into the rhythm of your own footsteps, perhaps your own heartbeat, as you pace from room to room...

Brian Holmes

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Even for a generation weaned on video games and MTV, Jordan Crandall’s Drive (Track 1)—the first component of a seven-part video series—has the power to arrest. With an aesthetic somewhere between music video, a late-night Cops episode, and digital broadcast "footage" of the Gulf War, Drive rests uneasily in a landscape filtered through a set of historically disparate, culturally and politically loaded technologies including black-and-white 8mm and 16mm film, digital video, and computerized targeting and tracking systems. Within this condensed, technologically hybrid space, the body and the machine collapse into one another, resulting in a mode of operation hardly unfamiliar to today’s communication/information culture.

Motion -- this is what propels the piece conceptually and formally. From a single monitor suspended just below pipework in a dank, raw cranny of P.S.1’s boiler room, a silent, fast-paced barrage of shots flashes: a wrist flexes, a bus passes, a man in a business suit weaves through a crowd, a teenager runs down a dark alley, an eye blinks. "Caught on tape"–type scenes of a pursuit through an abandoned industrial space are intercut with crowded, colorful, urban streetscapes and with sensuously lit, close-up motion studies of a body that could pass as a contemporary, disrobed version of the industry worker in Lewis W. Hine’s Powerhouse Mechanic (1925). Although the beat of the piece as a whole is quick, Crandall choreographed a precise rhythm that interweaves slow-motion shots with sped-up shots, a lingering or steady camera with one jounced by the cameraman’s walk, various cycles of repetition, and zooms and pans that alternately bring the image into focus or abstract it entirely. Adding into the mix a completely different trajectory, Crandall incorporated a military tracking technology that traces the on-screen movements with eerie green contour lines that emerge from tiny telescopic crosshairs floating over the action. The monitor is raised well above a comfortable line of sight, close to the ceiling of an oddly situated room in which the floor begins at about eye level. The piece is viewed through an open door, and the lack of steps leading into the elevated room makes the installation literally inaccessible and lends it a faintly Alice in Wonderland-like feel. The general effect is one of witnessing a frenzied yet carefully coordinated operation of surveillance that fluidly penetrates everything from the mundane to the sketchy.Productivity. Efficiency. Economy. Drive is the product of a world busily decoding the genome, engineering handguns and personal computers that can instantaneously recognize their owners, and biochemically altering groceries that (for our convenience) are now available for purchase on-line. Where once movement was described by a single, progressive line, it now configures multidimensionally, synchronically. In Drive, sequences that verge on creating narrative space (a sidewalk scene, a pan across an empty warehouse) are momentarily flattened into surfaces to be inscribed. Motion does not always equal narrative thrust; rather, it exists as the transmission of a stream of information that can be charted and calculated. With the flip of a technological switch, a man in the street suddenly becomes a body mapped—simultaneously a natural form and a set of coordinates. The corpse emerges as a corpus of knowledge.As Crandall writes about the piece, "movement is no longer seen as much as processed—or rather, it is represented by way of its processing." Drive’s tracking has neither the wide-eyed naïvete of Edward Muybridge’s science-driven motion studies, nor the paranoid mentality of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (October 3–25, 1969), in which the artist follows unsuspecting people in the street. With its mix of analog and network, civilian and military media, Drive neither heralds nor denounces contemporary culture's data-hungry mindset. The old paradigm of linear progression morphs into that of the database.

With its tracking technologies and peculiar perch above the viewer, Drive subtly invokes privilege, power networks, and political organization. The unusual context suggests that we are witnessing something not normally seen by the ordinary public, but the piece’s enclosure in the envelope of the art institution tells us otherwise. Are we privy to a body of information usually locked behind political doors, or dominated by a mechanism of surveillance? That many of these military-derived technologies are now commercially available emphasizes the point. The confusion is intentional: the viewed public collapses into the viewing public, and conclusions are deferred in favor of strategy. Whether this is unsettling or liberating is contingent upon your frame of mind. Grab your Dramamine.

Casey Ruble