[Nettime-bold] Jordan Crandall DRIVE

[Gena Gbenga <gbenga@blast.org>]

Jordan Crandall
DRIVE
Technology, Mobility, and Desire

ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlshrue
Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz
Hatje Cantz Publishers

Introduction by Peter Weibel
Edited by Brian Holmes
English
262 pp., 189 illustrations, 125 in color, numerous graphs,
14.5 x 22.7 cm, softcover
ISBN 3-7757-1174-0
January 2003

http://www.artbook.com
http://www.hatjecantz.de

The work of artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall is a major
contribution to the understanding of media and communication technology
and its impact on the human being and the visual arts. Drive will remain
as a privileged document about artistic thought in the nineties, of a
deep change in the concept of art, media and life. But the central issue
of this book leads much further: Crandall offers a coherent theory of
the individual, its redefinition through the media space and through
worldwide communication networks. Drive is about thinking the image and
the status of the human being in the age of Internet and of globalized
mass media. Under these conditions, Jordan Crandall is pushing forward
two main philosophical investigations of the seventies and eighties:
Gilles Deleuze's concept of "Rhizome" and Michel Foucault's analysis of
the subject at the interface between technology and the body.
ROBERT FLECK, Independent critic and curator, director of Graduate
Studies at Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes

Jordan Crandall has the mind of a pragmatist and the heart of a utopian.
With astonishing breadth and rare lucidity, he calls upon
psychoanalysis, film theory, semiotics, and demography to expose the
insidious political and economic forces that structure and control the
“body-image-machine complex.” While sketching a chilling image of the
intersection of the ascendant database paradigm with military technology
and globalized commerce, Crandall does not succumb to cynicism or
fashionable passivity, but presents an urgent case for the possibility
of “new identity formations and agencies.” In his art, writing, and
editorial work, Crandall has fashioned a critically important survival
guide to the emerging present.
LAWRENCE RINDER, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum, New
York

In Drive, Jordan Crandall boldly re-figures the fundamental metaphors
guiding our interactions with digital media, including "pages," "nodes,"
and "links."   He adopts instead the idea of a differentiated field that
includes computers, networks, users and physical spaces. Working from
this premise, he shows how the metaphor of the vehicle, imagined both as
a transportation device and as a semiotic-linguistic entity, can be used
to re-think our embodied relation to inscription technologies and
particularly to digital media.  Richly imagined and powerfully argued,
this book has the potential to revolutionize our discourses about media
and consequently the possibilities we can envision for them -- and for
us.
N. KATHERINE HAYLES, Professor of English and Media Arts at UCLA and
author of _How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics_

Between machine vision and a database, between art world, critical
theory and new media, between a screen and a mobile vehicle, between art
practice, writing and net-dialog, between the network and the cinematic,
between theory and visual poetry -- Jordan Crandall’s works strike at
the most critical conceptual knots of our computer culture.
LEV MANOVICH, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at University of
California San Diego and author of _The Language of New Media_

Today, Jordan Crandall's urgent voice demands to be heard. His work in
media theory compels us to recognize the extent to which our
consciousness is formed, manipulated and maintained by a range of
technologies extending from those associated with image production to
those constructing and managing ubiquitous networks.
DAVID A. ROSS, former Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Jordan Crandall’s reflections on the relation between “technological
facing,” sensorium and subjectivity update Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s
insights as vision and desire are wired in imaging technologies produced
for Hollywood and the military. Crandall’s fusion of film and
military-driven “strategic seeing” is not the stuff of science fiction
but a deconstructive replication of the
military-industrial-entertainment complex’s invasion of our perceptual
processes.
GEORGE YUDICE, Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean
Studies, New York University

Drive resists either cybernetic or science fiction scripts for digital
culture that often invite an indulgence in parallel or recursive
realities. For Jordan Crandall, digital devices are simply a new set of
interfaces and switches in the larger colloidal field of everything
else, and so they are about the material within which they are embedded
-- our bodies, our larger marketplaces and networks, and our daily
theaters of operation. Discussed as animations or activities, as verbs
rather than nouns, these technologies are passages between "interior and
exterior rhythms," and they both ventriloquize and receive life beyond
their own boundaries and capabilities. However invisible the may be,
they are the measured by the huge spaces they calibrate, spaces
controlled by commerce, by the military and by millions of other voices.
These very spaces that are both intrinsic and extrinsic to the digital
are Crandall's sites, not only discussed but occupied, in installations,
objects, online forums, essays and special publications.
KELLER EASTERLING, Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at
Yale University and author of Organization Space

What characterizes this important work as a whole is its grand human
scale and its attention to new phenomenologies of embodiment and
subjective experience. In Drive, Crandall makes a realm of surveillance
technologies that operate largely below the threshold of conscious
awareness felt in erotic choreographies and rhythmic uses of imagery.
Fresh theoretical categories emerge out of this art.
MARGARET MORSE, Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of
California Santa Cruz and author of Virtualities: Television, Media Art,
and Cyberculture


JORDAN CRANDALL is an artist and media theorist.  He is Assistant
Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California,
San Diego.

http://jordancrandall.com


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