Physiognomies: The portrait in the XXI century - Exhibition in Italy

Physiognomies: The portrait in the XXI century

PRIMO PIANO LIVINGALLERY (ITALY)
www.primopianogallery.com

June 2012

My Reports of Crime, Etc., Etc., video installation and Technosomatica still images are to be exhibited in this exhibition in Italy.

Video conferencing and inmates: a new observatory of the criminal body

My abstract has been accepted for presentation at the British Society of Criminology conference at the University of Portsmouth. Here's my abstract if you feel like reading it!:

Video conferencing has replaced the need for inmates to physically appear in certain criminal procedures. Transmitted from a small, remote video booth in a correctional centre, the incarcerated three-dimensional body appears virtually in the courtroom as a convenient two-dimensional indication of a body. We have moved from the corporeality of the accused person in the courtroom dock, to a real-time image of the criminal body immobilised, segregated and secured on a screen – a new observatory of humanity where dissymmetry is assured. As we seemingly enter an anti-somatic era, is the criminal body becoming obsolete? Contemporary society has an ambivalent relationship to the body where harvested bio-data is privileged over the idiosyncratic physical body. Kathryn Conrad suggests that the current move away from embodiment towards treating the body-as-information is affecting the ‘very ontology of the body’. Already there are visual substitutes that represent the criminal body, including forensic and biometric information, and now the screen-based virtual inmate video-linked from gaol, docile under the power of the state and serving the interests of the capitalist system.

This new observatory and modified visibility of the criminal is explored as a postbiological instrument of power, political technology and observation over the imprisoned body, where the inmate is reconceptualised and reduced to an isolated, inert, disembodied virtual subject. My research explores the impact of video conferencing through fieldwork involving interviews with inmates at Australian correctional centres. The resulting data will be analysed through the lens of theories of embodiment, phenomenology and critical criminology.

And I do like to consider my research filtered through my art practice; here's one image from a body of work, Technosomatica.

Prison video links

Prison video links

As I look forward to my trip to England shortly, it's interesting to see how prison video link technology is being used on the other side of the planet.

Sekula and the Body

I've been reading and writing about the accused/criminal body, seen as inherently dangerous and unsafe and distinct from the law-abiding body. Allan Sekula in his paper The Body and the Archive October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), pp. 3-64  (http://www.jstor.org/stable/778312 ) explores the photographic documentation of prisoners, and the mid-nineteenth century interest in phrenology and physiognomy. Sekula writes that both phrenology and physiognomy "shared the belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of inner character." (p.11). Relevant proponents of these fields included Johann Caspar Lavater and Franz Josef Gall. Photography and phrenology were eventually conjoined in 1846 when the American penal reformer and matron at Sing Sing, Eliza Farnham, sought portraits of the inmates and published Rationale of Crime and its Appropriate Treatment, Being a Treatise on Criminal Jurisprudence Considered in Relation to Cerebral Organization, New York, Appleton 1846.
Sekula refers to other nineteenth century practitioners including Cesare Lombroso, his interest in anthropological criminology, and his theory that people were born criminal ... which led me to hunt for some of Lombroso's images online. Interestingly, I found the Museo Criminologico in Rome http://www.museocriminologico.it/storia_6_uk.htm and in Turin: http://www.museounito.it/lombroso/

image from: http://sociologycriminology.wordpress.com/positive-theory-positivism/ accessed online 05/03/12

Lombroso's theories remain controversial and, not surprisingly, my online search revealed hostilities towards the Turin Museum and its collection of human remains.

The electronic frontier

...the electronic frontier is 'a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.'

Dreyfus, H.L., On the Internet (2001) Routledge p.4

I'm exploring theories of embodiment as they relate to the posthuman in the virtual realm and finding some good material in "The Body: A Reader" edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, Routledge 2005.
Does virtuality threaten the body with extinction, or does it offer new forms of embodiment and extensions of material awareness? My focus is upon the accused/criminal body.

Her Majesty's Courts Service - Information for Researchers

Her Majesty's Courts Service - Information for Researchers

Summer in London sounds like a good idea ... as well as a visit to the UK's virtual courts such as Camberwell Green Magistrates' Court, London and Medway Magistrates' Court in North Kent.

Surveillance conference: the artist as voyeur

The 'Surveillance and/in Everyday Life: Monitoring Pasts, Presents & Futures' conference is on at the University of Sydney 20-21 February 2012. I'm presenting on 'The Artist as Voyeur' in a panel called 'Artistic Practices and Interventions' and I'll be showing some of my covert footage from Japan, including this one:

 http://vimeo.com/35621436

Doing Time: Depth of Surface

Spanish artists Patricia Gómez and María  Jesús González have been commissioned to create a work that explores the archeology and past lives of the historic Philadelphia Holmesburg Prison (1896-1995). The artists detached the surface of the prison walls, the 'skin of architecture', using a technique known as 'strappo'. The resulting works act as silent witnesses to the prison events and tangible records of the former residents and staff. The exhibition also features surveillance-style video installations.

http://vimeo.com/31812447

http://www.philagrafika.org/

Weegee: Murder is My Business

The work of Weegee (1899-1968) is being exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York:
http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/weegee-murder-my-business

Weegee documented New York crime scenes in his dramatic photographs and text. This exhibition is drawn from the Weegee Archive at ICP with recreations of his apartment and exhibitions.

Anakhronismos: video art screening 27 January 2012

I've been invited to curate the next Illuminations video art screening at Bondi Pavilion:
Friday 27 January 2012
6 - 9 pm (one night only)

Here's my catalogue essay:

αναχρονισμός Anakhronismos ΑΝΑΧΡΟΝΙΣΜΟΣ

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Greek anakhronismos, from ana- ‘backward’ + khronos ‘time.’

Our daily lives are chronologically arranged, time measures our moves, structures our internal narratives and puzzles philosophers and scientists alike. We waste, take, kill and do time, yet the concept remains elusive. We dream of time travel to a nostalgic past or utopian future: how ironic is it that the quintessential time machine, Dr Who’s TARDIS, is an anachronistic British police box? Paradoxically, anachronism has currency in video art practices with the technologies and content implicated by artists. Experimentation with the obsolete and futuristic, the relic and the speculative, and an awareness that our methods today face extinction tomorrow, are part of the joy of connecting past, present and future in video art. Time code is the defining language of digital video. Artists find expression in frames per second, with editing software allowing temporal relationships to be splintered, echoed, layered and suspended, expanding non-linear possibilities. Video, the ‘art of time’ according to video historian Michael Rush, has been used by artists to foreground the subjective experience of both duration and timelessness. Moments can be dramatically fast-forwarded or extended, slowed, repeated, and revisited with re-editing and through looping repetition, a mesmerising endless episode may be created.

With the works of Anne Ferran, Yoram Gross, Matthew Hopkins, Brian Joyce & Trevor Ditcham, Carolyn McKay, Kate Richards & Ross Gibson, and Vanessa White, viewers can reflect upon the relentless process of the present falling into the past, the future slipping into the present, and the sweet anticipation of the future remaining infinitely out of reach.

Carolyn McKay