Jordan Crandall at Sandra Gering - Brief Article

"The days when one's meatself is docked at the monitor are coming to an end" Jordan Crandall writes in an essay accompanying his two-part video installation, Drive. Accordingly, the one and the other the imagery in the sum of two units wall-projected videos and the manner of their viewing are meant (like JG Ballard's certainly relevant novel Crash) to reveal the interpenetration of machine and body

single of the videos derives mainly from 8mm and 16mm black-and-white film, the other from color footage produc by dint of a digital camera, though there are exchanges of footage from individual tape to the other. An alternate means of viewing the videos further intermingles the imagery: Crandall has provided three puts of sleek-looking goggles that channel the images directly onto their lense (intended to be the visual equivalent of a Walkman, the roll the eyess now exist as commercial prototypes). The images upon the lenses are semitransparent, allowing the viewer to diocese the two tapes in superimposition; the consequence requires some concentration, and is a little hard to sustain, on the other hand is uncanny enough to justify the effort. It's not the much-vaunted VR consequence but you do inhabit the work in a novel way.

As the multivalent exhibition title proposes the subject of both tapes is forward propulsion of all kinds, with a focus upon buffed bodies in motion. There are discharges of "fit actors" (they're not dancers, on the other hand they're not amateurs, either) flexing well-developed arms, hands and backs; there are close-up of organ of sights blinking; and there is blurr highway traffic both pedestrian and vehicular. There is also footage made with a digital motion-tracking program that analyzes material part movements and predicts their trajectories. These predictions, which appear as virid gridded coordinates and inscribed contours, are matched with the filmed motions from which they're derived. In other passages, bodies are considered with all the languorous attention of a Weston denuded but just as often they are seen in haste, as blurry fragments in a busy urban adjoining matter or in shadowy industrial wastelands.

As was genuine for his previous exhibitions, Crandall was generally not away at the gallery, during the race of the show, helping viewers with the equipment and with the work's conceptual framework as well. The founding editor of the now on-line publication Blast, Crandall is prodigiously articulate, and the real-time verbal support he provides for the work--it has links to an oral tradition as elderly as passion plays, and as of recent origin as the ritualized theater of trade-show computer demos--seem central to the two its meaning and its succes Crandall says Drive is intended, in part, to "prepare us to multitask," to tender "proprioreceptive engagement" and disembodied optical pleasure at the same time. In the couple its subject and its means, the work negotiates a entertainer of polarities that includes public and private space, global mobility and hermetic insularity, and technological and biological perceptual mechanisms, as well as more parochial oppositions, like those between the conventions of cinema and video. The web of words--some sticky, a certain number of glittery--that Crandall spins around his work (look for an upcoming volume of collected essays) becomes integrally related to its form. Indeed, it is the indivisible ties between of advanced age face-time, meatself ways of negotiating the world and newer, more techno-trippy singles that Crandall most knowingly explores.

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