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Ten years after the making of Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, it is this seamless weaving of ideology and the social body through the video interface of a global feedback system that becomes the focus of Birnbaum's Rio Videowall. A public art wall project commissioned and designed for an Atlanta shopping mall Rio Videowall extends Birnbaum's interrogation of the simulacrum as a site of contestatlon to an investigation of the ways in which a proliferation of image and data flow occupy the social body, subjecting the reordering of difference and sameness to an ideological circularity. In the middle of the public plaza, Birnbaum has placed a video bank of twenty five monitors. When the plaza is emptied of people, the data bank of images exist in a dormant state of aestheticized tranquillity: filled with digitalized images of the natural landscape existing on the site of the mall before it was built. However, when the shoppers fill the plaza, the movement of their bodies interrupts this smooth simulacrum landscape. For within the mall itself, two live surveillance cameras are linked to the video wall, so that when pedestrians pass in front of the camera, the silhouettes of their bodies are keyed into the pristine Edenic state of the image data banks. As the live body is dematerialised through the surveillance camera and rematerialized as an image in the plaza, the body's shell is simultaneously filled with live satellite transmissions from CNN: Atlanta, of course, being the hometown of Ted Turner's media empire. In the process, a riot confusion of feedback and transmission, appearances and copies, ensues: pointing to the interface of the video screen as a mechanism of representation that leads, in Paul Virillio's words "from the aesthetics of the appearance of a stable image to the aesthetics of the disappearance of an unstable image."(17)
Using the interface of the video screen to intertwine the architecture of commodification and rewriting of the body through information, the distractions of the mall and the distractions of the news flow are temporally suspended and conflated within the simulacrum. Here, the externalisation of technology through surveillance and internalisation of technology through the ubiquitous computing of Xerox PARC are reversed. Instead of technologies "weaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it," Birnbaum's installation highlights the invisible economies of technology's coercion. For rather than amplifying an information flow of data and images, the insertions of the bodies as shells overflowing with information points to the sensory deprivation that occurs when the determinacy of culture displaces the indeterminacy of nature. In the Rio Videowall project, the reordering of sameness and difference through the interface of the video screen points to the paradoxical function of technology to insure an ideological unity through a decentralisation of image transmission. In so doing, Birnbaum's work serves to echo a warning issued by Michael Taussig, (an Australian anthropologist and theorist) that "the most critically important feature of the war of silencing is its geographical, epistemological and military strategic decentredness. " (18)
In Birnbaum's work, Hostage, first exhibited at the Paula Cooper gallery in New York in 1994, an interrogation of the global nervous system at its most nervous ensues: an interrogation that explicitly links Virilio's "aesthetics of the disappearance of an unstable image" to such a war of silencing. A six channel video installation with an interactive laser beam, Hostage takes as its point of departure the media coverage of the kidnapping of the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction in 1977, and the subsequent suicide of three of the Baader Meinhof members in Stammheim prison. In the installation, four monitors were suspended from the ceiling, diagonally spanning the gallery space. Another two monitors were mounted at eye level on opposite walls of the gallery with a laser beam ruffling between them at the chest height. On the four monitors suspended from the ceiling, images of archival television footage of events from the period of the kidnapping are simultaneously transmitted: images montaged and repeated by Birnbaum to construct from the invisible order of the ubiquitousness of a contemporary field of vision a perceptible chaos.
At the far end of the gallery, the video screen mounted on the wall featured an interview with Schleyer videotaped through the eye of the vitro clandestine camera of the kidnappers, and rebroadcast on German television at the time of the kidnapping to "prove" Schleyer was still alive. Directly opposite this video, the sixth monitor bombarded the viewer with fast cutting clips in which text from various American newspaper reports on the hostage taking crisis and the Red Army Faction is superimposed upon a visual background of archival footage from the other monitors. When the viewer passed in front on the laser beam that connected the two monitors, the image and text on the news gathering monitor was frozen in time and space for as long as the viewer remained in the line of the laser's light. Fragmented, disjointed, nervous making the video installation positioned the viewer in a place where all images were collapsed into simultaneous time. The viewer, as much as the Germans at the time of the kidnapping, is held hostage to an image machine: as if the interface of a global feedback system had gone awry, no longer assuring control but producing chaos. Here, interactivity was not the allure of integration, but the shock of finding oneself a target of the nervous system. For it is only when caught in the 'light' of the laser beam that historical time was momentarily frozen.
In turn, the role of the viewer as a media target was mirrored by the plexiglass silhouettes of a firing range target that were suspended in front of each ceiling monitor, Resembling the shell of a body, these targets became metaphorical interfaces between body and screen, explicitly linking the omnipotence of technology to state control. On each target, the imprint of a bullseye ring was elongated to simulate a fingerprint: evoking another form of interface in which the imprint of the body's contact with the state entangles identity and ideology not only in the flow of images but the classification of information. At the beginning of each of the six video tapes that were continuously playing, an image of this target was reproduced and superimposed upon an electronic identification countdown for the broadcast transmission of United Press International Television Network. Serving as an image map for the information flow on the video screens, this target was keyed with the words, "roving reporter", to acknowledge the independent news gathering service from which Birnbaum obtained the footage for Hostage. Footage that had been withheld by all the major mass media sources and German television. As the countdown reached zero, the image of the target was riddled with bullet shots, further adding to the noise and confusion of the installation's visual pandemonium.
While only the most determined viewer could have pieced together the disparate data of the six monitors into a coherent narrative, a viewing of Birnbaum's installation channel by channel makes explicit the many guises in which the State deploys the ubiquitousness of a contemporary field of vision. For the German state, the screen not only functions to transmit information, but to withhold it. It becomes a mask to black-out information, a tool of negotiating with the kidnappers, a broadcast site for the video sent by the kidnappers of Schleyer. After the murder and recovery of Schleyer's body, it also serves to resurrect the body of Schleyer as a martyr to the central nervous system's collapse, in the newspaper text on the sixth monitor which included a New York Times report that "television cancelled programs and substituted funeral music,' and a Chicago Tribune report on October 26, 1977, that "the ceremony was televised into the factories of Daimer-Benz, of which Schleyer had been a director." On the other hand, for the members of the Baader Meinhof group, the interface of the screen becomes a site of absence, a space in which only the guards at Stammheim prison are witness to a continual video surveillance. As a result, the subsequent "suicides" of the Baader Meinhof members while in prison become a discursive site of media theatre, in which the reports on the hostage taking crisis circulating in print medium construct a narrative that fills in the image gaps of television.
In Birnbaum's archival reworking of this narrative, she uncovers the use of gendered identity by the mass media as a division between monstrosity and violence. Interspersed throughout the more factual reports on the hostage taking, news clips from American sources on the sixth monitor construct a psychology of West German "terrorism" based upon women's participation in the Red Army Faction. Revealing the paradoxical determinacy and indeterminacy of gender in the flow of information, Newsweek attributes this phenomenon "to the typical emotional fervour of females," while simultaneously reporting the denunciation of a German woman politician who argues that "these women negate everything that is part of the established feminine character." The Chicago Tribune quotes a German police official in saying "women's participation (in terrorism) is the dark side of women's emancipation," while a headline of the Los Angeles Times, "A new generation of deadly young women," is accompanied by an assessment of a German criminologist who links their feminine pathology to "the influence of domineering mothers,' and fathers who were "often described as dictatorial and absent." But perhaps the most succinct analysis is offered by a neighbour of a Baader Meinhof member, who is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as describing how "she sang communist songs all night and never cleaned the stairs."
A cacophony of image circulation and information overload, Hostage succeeds in locating in the hostage taking crisis of 1977 a collapse of the nervous system upon itself. It pinpoints an historical moment in which the interface of the screen and the image bled over into the social body to entangle image and response, terror and repression. Holding up a mirror of the nervous system to itself, Birnbaum reveals behind an ordered system of representation a deadly embrace of appearances, in which the Baader Meinhof group and the German state are caught into a game of mimicry in which each imitates the other in a constant escalation of violence. Conjuring image phantoms from history to reveal the internal logic of the nervous system, she escalates a nervous flow of images to the point where the interface of the screen becomes a death space in which the copies of the simulacra stare down upon each other. For like the ancient Aztec god of sorcery, Tezcatlipoca, whose allusive smoking mirror revealed behind the chimera of the image the raw face of power, Birnbaum points in Hostage to the coercive mechanisms of image control that underlie an image proliferation. And as a sorcerer, Birnbaum also uses Hostage to reinvest the images of history with meaning. Reordering images through the simulation of an historical moment, Birnbaum mimics the constant movement of the nervous system to fracture the ubiquitousness of a contemporary field of vision into a "profane illumination" of discordance. In so doing, Birnbaum points to the potential of re-enchanting history through the image phantasms that lurk beneath the smooth surface of the simulacrum: embracing the strategy of a roving reporter who sifts through image banks to discover the ghosts of ideology that haunt the interfaces of a global feedback system
Perhaps what is most fascinating in Birnbaum's Hostage is the inability of the mass media coverage that inundates the viewer on the sixth monitor to offer a cogent analysis of the system's sudden nervousness, outside, of-course, an interpretation of women guerrillas as the unfortunate by-product of female emancipation. Time and Newsweek coverage of the event in 1977 offer 'no ready explanation to the terrorist movement except that it grew out of the Vietnam War,' noting that the 'emergence of a fanatical minority has baffled analysts. Such bafflement was not ingenuous. Attempts by leading European theorists in Semiotext(e)'s German Issue to disentangle the ideological and technological strands that wove the mimetic escalation of violence in Germany, a sense of unease and confusion ensues compounded by division of the pages of the journal to mimic the division of the Berlin Wall (18). At the same time, it was here that Paul Virilio first published Pure War and Jean Baudrillard began his slippery theoretical slide towards the hyperreal. In this light, it is interesting to note that in Paul Virilio's 'L'Espace Critique', published in 1984, he contextualizes his analysis of the ubiquitousness of contemporary vision by arguing that the architecture of a global system is generated as a response to the euroterrorism of the late 1970s whereby the "screen interface of computers,televisions, and teleconference, the surface of inscriptions, hitherto devoid of depth, becomes a kind of 'distance', a depth of field of a new kind of representation, a visibility without any face-to-face encounter" (19). In linking the image proliferations of the simulacrum to the defensive responses of a multinational capitalism and to the material traces of architecture,Virilio's analysis, like Birnbaum's Hostage, not only isolates the nervous system at its most nervous, but points to the ways in which economic, political, and military power is reformatted upon an image plane of information. For as a strategic focal point of a multinational capitalism's bid for global hegemony, the screen interface has not denuded representation of its power to influence the lived realities and productive forces of society, but paradoxically, doubled the stakes of representation's power to influence the global course of politics and economics From the televised simulations of the Gulf War to the frenzied trading of international money markets, the capitalist infrastructure that the students of May 1968 sought so idealistically to overthrow holds post-industrial society captive to what Michael Taussig has termed "the visual contract with reality,"(21) in which a mimetic structure of mediation accords the copy the power to affect the original. For in 1995, the ideological bipolarity that was unravelling in a still divided Germany's confrontation with the Baader Meinhof has collapsed into a global embrace of technology as an tool of enhancement, offering up the utopian fantasies of a cyberspace future as a salve for the violence that an Information Revolution enacts upon the social body.
In response to this increasing abstraction of technology and increasing power of the simulacrum, Birnbaum's work deploys the screen interface as a mirror to disrupt a mimetic structure of mediation: reflecting back and destabilising the entanglements of ideology and identity, of politics and the social body within a global feedback system. As such, Birnbaum's artistic interventions upon the smooth space of the simulacrum become highly political in intent. Rather than accord art the status of a pale and ineffective shadow of mass media, she points to its potential to function to render the internal logic of a global nervous system transparent, to conjure up the image phantoms of history embedded in a proliferation of images as material adversaries in a border war between ideology and identity. Here the seemingly irreconcilable opposites of art and action in May 1968 are reconfigured to point to the importance of art as an act of political intervention. For, to paraphrase Mark Weisner's claim that the "most profound technologies are those that disappear", the most profound ideologies are also those that disappear through technology's invisible economies of domination. To challenge these invisible economies of domination as Birnbaum does in her work is to locate within the simulacrum not only a site of contestation but resistance: excavating from the ubiquitousness of a contemporary field of vision the power copies have to interrogate an ordered hierarchy of representation, to undermine the ideological underpinnings of a global nervous system.
Notes
17. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension. Translated by Daniel Moshenberg.
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 25.
18. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York ; Routledge, 1992)p.
21.
19. Paul Virilio, L'espace Critique (1984)
20. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, p12
Copyright © : Dot Tuer ,1995.
N.Paradoxa : Issue 3, May 1997