this interview covers crandall's documenta x project, which can now be
seen at vuk cosic's http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/dx/.

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Interview with Jordan Crandall
By Brian Holmes

For documenta X, Jordan Crandall is presenting a multimedia installation
called suspension, which combines various types of projections–video
recordings of the space itself, synthetic renderings, live
closed-circuit images of the visitors, washes of three-color light–to
create a space which the distinctions between "real" and "virtual" fade
away, as the visitor seeks to adapt to an environment which is
constantly modified by his or her own activity. This modulating
environment also materializes on home computer screens via the documenta
website; certain of its parameters are expressed in the printed form of
a book, while others have crystallized in the form of small, hand-held
objects. This interview explores Crandall's views on the interface
between technology and the intentional body.

Brian Holmes: The mix of computer processor, cathode ray tube, and
cable-to-satellite transmission networks has given us sets of
perceptual/representational equipment–what you call 'vehicles'–that
reconfigure our relation to the world. Can you describe the emerging fit
between the mass-produced vehicle and its operator? Who's driving who?

Jordan Crandall: The vehicle is embedded in, and constituted by,
historically specific sets of communications technologies,
code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a type
of transport (which could be simply "imagination"). Its condition is
that of movement; its function is to hold the body and mobilize it at
the same time, reorienting it through a complex of interlocking
mechanisms that participate in producing bodily faculties and
awarenesses. It endeavors to produce an adequate occupant. It "couples"
with a subject, locks onto it and "fits" it with molded parts and arrays
of components, which define parameters of movement. But it is also
produced through embodied practices (although increasingly annexed to
"market research") and its components bear the impressions of the
use-patterns that inform them. The vehicle wants to hold you with an
alluring finish and a cozy fit. It's where technology rises up to meet
the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this
interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort,
convenience. The vehicle is the interface to the market structures that
will always take you there in a faster, cleaner, more comfortable way in
a process that becomes nearly surgical. And the vehicle offers itself up
as a sacrifice: its own materiality implodes, it scatters into arrays of
parts, it inserts itself directly into the body, accompanied by media
that help to produce desire for these "conveniences" in the name of
self-improvement, progress, and adequacy. One rides simply to be
counted; to matter; to be privy to the terms; to not be shut out like an
abandoned hitchhiker.

BH: Which is, of course, exactly the feeling that many people have. But
let's try to understand, let's look inside. Your installation at
documenta proposes various different "fits" between the visitor and the
objects or devices in the space. It's a matter of getting one's
bearings, of finding a rhythm between one's own movement and the
projections on the walls.

JC: This rhythm coordination is articulated in terms of "pacing." One
paces back and forth within a space in order to in/habit a
thought-formation. It's as if you move or walk through information,
grounding and embodying it, through the agency of a physicalized beat.
Pacing generates a beat that informs cognition. But it also undercuts
it: at the same time that it physicalizes and locates, it also abstracts
the boundaries and relationships between body and space in a kind of
visual delirium. To be aware of pacings is to be aware of the cues, or
vectors, that encode and initiate mobilization. When you pace back and
forth, change a channel, respond to the dryer buzzer, pick up the phone
or the sheet of paper from the printer, those are vector-movements. The
installation space at documenta is crisscrossed with networks of these
vectors. And here the other sense of pacing arises–the pacings of
technological devices and systems, to which embodied rhythms are
increasingly annexed, compelled to conform. Pacing marks a zone of
liberty or a zone of commodification, though of course the distinctions
aren't so easily made, and one doesn't have a choice so much as an
option to pay attention.

[…]

BH: You said that the social landscape is increasingly dominated by
marketing strategies. Design objects become electronic stimulus-devices,
calibrated to trigger certain behaviors. The mass-produced vehicles,
like the routes they travel, are ways of channeling human relations.
Where does art intervene? Do you think the public presentation of work
like yours can help people choose their place amid this new
technological conditioning of social space?

JC: Ideally the work is an event that prompts an awareness of the
positions that surround it, and the configurations that tie those
positions together according to various needs. How are viewer and work
constituted in an act of perceptual mediation, how are they mobilized,
what ties them together, within what contexts, and to what end? What
perceptual, temporal, and embodied capacities does this event mark and
help to shape? What new agencies? The days of ivory-tower art analysis
are over. Contemporary artwork has no currency if seen primarily in
terms of traditional aesthetic concerns, and part of our work is to
dislodge these notions from public conceptions and institutional
programs, paying attention to the vast networks of forces and practices
that operate below the surface. Aesthetic forms are bound up in visual
technologies, and perception itself is technologically mediated. What is
the sociotechnical field through which the artwork is viewed, and which
helps determine the way it is viewed? What visual capacity is it helping
to shape? What orientations, what paces, what signification forms? The
stakes are high; we are engaged in a battle for the terms of
communication and materialization (and communication is always
materializing). The aesthetic field is a site of the conflict. The
agenda for art would be to articulate these struggles for the terms of
mattering.