Friday 27 July 2007

People looking and moving in the low available light of Colin Powell’s fabrication
















In the light
QuickTime Movie, 2.1Mb 1' 14"

Phantom Truck, The Radio.

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s installation is a full-scale replica of what is alleged to be a mobile biological weapons lab. The work is collated from descriptions presented to the United Nations in 2003 by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and images of trucks taken after the subsequent invasion of Iraq. This object of speculation was used to justify the US preemptive strike. It proved not to be capable of weapons’ production. The evidence “discovered” after the fact, turned out to be pure fabrication. - documenta catalogue

We enter sculptural space, watching and looking shades into movement and spatial negotiation, moving through rooms marked by darkness, red filtered daylight and the relative blue of ‘natural’ light in the distance, animated in real time by the low light setting on the video camera.

Wednesday 25 July 2007

People Watching

People Watching
QuickTime Movie
7.1Mb 4' 17"

At Documenta Harun Farocki’s Deep Play shows us various perspectives on the final of the 2006 World Cup. We see the ‘clean feed’, the television networks’ raw material, we see individual players on both teams, we see computer generated representations of the game, we see maps of the flow of play. Across four groups of three screens the action proceeds in simultaneous ‘real time’, action and simulation, abstraction and manipulation. This is an intelligent and integral multiplicity, a spectacle that interrogates the processes and technology that produces it. Further to this the spectator to the installation actively engages in producing their own experience, watching is creative, we are reminded how much activity in these exhibitions consists of people looking and watching and how active is that looking and watching.