The Territory of Images


Thanks to the Millennium Film Journal I have had the opportunity to write about another one of my heroes, Harun Farocki. In the latest issue, MFJ55 Structures and Spaces,  is my essay/review “The Territory of Images: Harun Farocki, Images of War at a Distance” on his show at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA is collecting nearly all of his work, so one room had a video library that allowed visitors to watch many of his single channel works on demand. The rest of the space in the exhibition was devoted to installation work from the last ten years. This work addresses implications of newer perceptual apparatuses (video surveillance, automated remote warfare, virtual reality simulations) – forms that more explicitly articulate and complicate the politics of geography and space.

i-docs

Next week I will be at i-docs, a symposium “interrogating the field of interactive documentary” that will be held at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, UK. I’ll be giving a presentation on our (in progress) AR/walking tour project Oyster City. It looks like a great program.

Cinematic Time Replayed


The newly redesigned Millennium Film Journal No. 54 is out. It includes my essay “Cinematic Time Replayed” – a review of two shows: Hubbard and Birchler’s Méliès at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Christian Marclay’s The Clock at Paula Cooper Gallery. It compares the way the pieces re-engage cinema’s inherent relationship to time, one looking to socially inscribed place and space (the trace), the other organized around the algorithm, accumulation and omission (the cut).

Oyster City

Oyster City is an augmented reality walking tour and game about the history of oysters in the New York City area that I am working on with Meredith Drum and Phoenix Toews. The project is being built for the iOS platform (iPhone and iPad) with software that Phoenix developed. Oyster City will make visible relationships between ecological, social and economic histories as players interact with virtual objects and narratives placed in the landscape. We will be presenting a workshop on using augmented reality along with an early demo of our project at Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit at the New School in October.

The Family Analog

Rachel.Stevens_VE18blogphotoHere is proof, from the V18 blog, that I presented my orphan photo archive project The Family Analog with a talk called Borrowing and Ordering the Many at the excellent Visible Evidence 18 conference.