 Two presentations by artists that approach documentary issues outside
of the straight film/video realm. The artist collective Battery
Operated's S.P.I.R.A.W.L. (Sound
Proofed Institute of Research into Acoustic Weapons Logistics) is a
web-based project about the militarization of sound. Starting from the
basic principles of resonant frequencies and the human auditory range,
the project looks at military and civilian police research into these
realms and asks, "what happens when you cannot see what will harm you?"
You can view the website here.
Following that is Naeem Mohaiemen's project Dictionary of War: POW
which is adapted from a talk he gave at Munich Mufathalle. This
media-based presentation examines the phrase "prisoner of war" largely
through the history of Maoist underground insurgencies in Bangladesh in
the 1970s. "He looked at his death and wondered whether this made any
sense. To have died for a reason not particularly clear to him. Was all
this because of the way he looked?" - Afsan Chowdhury
Battery Operated
is a collaboration of artists based in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere
that have been producing sound, video and Internet projects since 2000.
Their first project Chases Through Non-Place used music in public
places as its source and since then they have researched and developed
projects around the social uses of functional sound and video, from
"Muzak" to surveillance cameras.
Naeem Mohaiemen is an artist working in Dhaka and New York. He created Visible Collective (disappearedinamerica.org),
an artist-activist collective that creates interventions on migrant
impulses, hyphenated identities and post-9/11 security panic. Excerpts
have shown widely as installations, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial
(Wrong Gallery). Naeem's film on Hawthorne Effect and political Islam,
Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie, screened at the British House
of Lords and E-flux Video Library. Other projects include Between Devil
& Deep Blue (Asia Society, New York), System Error: War Is A Force
That Gives Us Meaning (Palazzo Papesse, Siena), and Death in Penn
Station (Exit Art, New York).
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