Symposium

Sorting Daemons Symposium

Biography

Jordan Crandall (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist and theorist based in Los Angeles, and an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. Crandall's video installations, such as the recent 3-channel work Homefront, combine formats and genres deriving from traditional cinema as well as military and surveillance culture, exploring 21st-century regimes of power and their effects on subjectivity, identity, sociality, and embodiment. He is currently completing a new video, Hotel, which probes the realms of extreme intimacy, where techniques of control combine with techniques of the self, and paranoia combines with pleasure. He is the founding editor of the journal Version (http://version.org).

Crandall’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; ARTLAB, Tokyo; The Kitchen, New York; AGORA, Rio de Janeiro; TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam; and the Whitney Museum, New York. His ongoing art and research project, Under Fire, concerning the organization and representation of violence, has resulted in two catalogues published by the Witte de With center for contemporary art, Rotterdam, and a new online archive developed for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville.

Crandall writes and lectures regularly on technology and culture. An anthology of his projects and critical writing-entitled Drive-was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in conjunction with Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlshrue, in 2002. His recent writing concerns the culture of tracking, which looks at tracking as a technology, a discourse, and a perceptual modality; contemporary forms of "readiness" or affective modulation; and the dynamics of emergent systems. He has lectured at Columbia University, New York; Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna; Washington Project for the Arts/ Corcoran Museum, Washington, DC; University of São Paulo, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London.

 

"Reconsidering Surveillance, from Panopticon to Program, Tracking to Formulating, "Closed World" Control to Open-Sourced Security, Apparatus to Assemblage"

The end of the panoptic paradigm is in sight. It has been said that we are moving from a closed-world paradigm of "control" to an open-sourced one of "security" – from the paradigm of the disciplinary institution to that of the improvisational organization; from the analytical paradigm of the apparatus to that of the assemblage; from "subject-oriented" orientations to "object-oriented" ones. When we consider these paradigmatic shifts, what happens to the concept of "surveillance"?