Observation

I’ve been musing lately on cam­eras, the power of the image and the role of the media. It star­ted when Naomi paid for a video person to sky­dive with me and record the exper­i­ence. I had no prob­lem with that — or at least with what I thought was about to happen. How­ever, mid-way through freefall, the tandem master is saying to me “look at the camera’ Hang on, I thought. Isn’t the camera here to record my exper­i­ence, not create my exper­i­ence? Should­n’t it effect­ively be a dumb observer rather than an inter­act­ive par­ti­cipant? I was very resent­ful of the intrusion.

And then the tsunami: being at Wood­ford, I was very removed from the event. I saw no imagery. I was not over­whelmed with foot­age and round-the-clock cov­er­age. I read news­pa­per reports and saw a couple of photos, mostly of Swedish chil­dren, and seem to have had a very dif­fer­ent response to many others. I have still not really seen extens­ive footage.

Thursday, I spent the whole day wan­der­ing around Proof: the Act of Seeing with Your Own Eyes at ACMI. It explores the nature of evid­ence: his­tor­ical evid­ence, crim­inal evid­ence, sci­entific evid­ence. I became aware of how value-neut­ral much of the foot­age was without addi­tional inter­pret­ive know­ledge, which I clearly lacked (but which was sup­plied via accom­pa­ny­ing text or over­laid interpretation). 

The iSee pro­ject which can map you the route of least sur­veil­lance through a city. The BIT­plane pro­ject, a remote-con­trol aero­plane flying under the radar in Sil­icon Val­ley’s no-fly zone — merely build­ings from the air for me without the con­tex­tu­al­ising names of build­ings and fact­oids about the com­pan­ies. The odd little film about the FBI raid on Steven Kur­tz’s prop­erty after his wife died, the camera pan­ning over con­ven­tion badges, slides on the floor, rub­bish bags filled with pizza boxes, book­shelves, all made mean­ing­ful only because of tags that say ‘the FBI seized books on bio­logy and ter­ror­ism leav­ing spinoza and baudril­lard to grav­ity’. The incred­ibly long film on hijack­ing since the 1930s, ori­ginal foot­age of hijack­ers and planes and explo­sions and bizarre jux­ta­pos­i­tions of anim­ated anim­als, a seduct­ive voi­ceover like a man read­ing an anonym­ous diary and only the loc­a­tions and dates — Lock­er­bie, Berlin, Israel, 1972, 1988, 1958 — making con­nec­tions, made before ⁹⁄₁₁, the glar­ing omis­sion, the con­text we all know and the film is unaware of. The dis­turb­ing foot­age of dic­tat­ors on home movies — Hitler, Franco, Mao, Stalin — smil­ing, play­ing with chil­dren, swim­ming, with voi­ceovers cobbled together from bio­graph­ies and auto­bi­o­graph­ies, read in the first person, and the absence of know­ledge and the absence of con­text chilling in its intens­ity. The camera here is a dumb observer but the wielder of the camera is not, the editor is not. Value judge­ments are being made every second. 

I was very dis­turbed and intrigued by Mir­anda July’s The Ama­teur­ist in which she plays both a pro­fes­sional observer and the woman seem­ingly trapped in a cell, making random shapes with her body and being inter­preted for the audi­ence by the watcher. 

Then, last night, on the other side. At Grogb­log­ging 05 partly at the behest of a Sydney lothario who wishes to remain name­less, stalk­ing Ms Fits. I would have been there anyway, but the camera would not have been. And I would not have engin­eered cir­cum­stances in which pho­to­graphy was pos­sible. Some of the pho­to­graphs have been taken with their sub­jects unaware, observed, simply behav­ing as they would. Others are posed, framed, distinct. 

I think our media lit­er­acy has trained us to see the com­pos­i­tion as the real­ity. We are used to smooth, seam­less trans­itions and care­ful crop­ping. Life recor­ded as it occurs jars, seems ama­teur, indic­ates dis­rup­tion and dis­aster. We are dis­com­fited by it accordingly.