I will write about just two telling moments that bracket my memory of A Thousand Eyes, the symposium on aesthetics, law and media technology, organized alongside Judy Radul’s exhibition World Rehearsal Court, by Tone Hansen (curator of the exhibition) and Milena Høgsberg at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo. Both exhibition and symposium were grand in intellectual scope—practical manifestoes for complexity. And thus, any official response to this intricately choreographed interdisciplinary effort must, first and foremost I think, honor this call to complexity. My particular effort is doubly complicated by the fact that Radul and I are good friends and this seems to matter particularly here as my insights could be read with an expectation of neutrality on the part of a respondent–something equivalent to the blindness of the Law—yet what should be kept in mind is that I share Radul’s askance of this blindness and neutrality. Still—aware that in formulating my response, I should somehow avoid prejudice, even of the positive persuasion—I will concentrate on the two moments of the conference that have stayed with me because I have a very difficult time knowing what to think about them.
On these two points, then, the proverbial jury is out:
I.
The first came in the morning, at the end of Costas Douzinas’ talk, which offered a broad outline of the international legal system and its increasing tendency to rob people of agency: “The subject of rights,” he noted, “now appears as a victim in need of protection.” Confronted with this institutionalized disempowerment (and the attendant sense of crippling, universal culpability), and reflecting on his own direct experience of popular protest in Greece, Douzinas urged his audience to “turn off their screens and head for the street.” This year’s waves of protests—which began in Tunisia, swept through the Middle East and Southern Europe beginning in the Spring and Summer of 2011 and have found a Northern variant in the Occupy Movement which was just starting to manifest itself at the moment of the conference—had been and still are often discussed in the news as products of Social Media. Douzinas’ conclusion must be read therefore as indignation in the face of this relegation of revolutionary agency to Facebook, tweets, iPhones, etc. Now, it should be noted that Radul’s work involves specially programmed cameras that pan and zoom in on the installation of “evidence” in the gallery spaces; they at once rehearse the creepy curiosity of Big Brother and offer a glimpse (via live-feed monitors) of the high degree of cinematic beauty and inquisitiveness to be found in surveillance. In short, there is evidence throughout of the cameras as “special agents.” Thus, given such a context for the conference, this simple call to turn off the screens and head for the streets seemed strange. Stranger still was the fact that, had we heeded this call and turned off the screens at the conference, the next speaker—Eyal Weizman, who in a twist of arch irony happened to be Skypeing in—would have been silenced (1). Through Douzinas’ rhetorical negation of the very technology that was indispensible for the conference, we were delivered a perfect pickle. I am still asking myself to what extent turning off the screens is necessary, and to what extent a new aesthetics of technology could alter the laws which govern us deep within. Might it be possible to turn off the imaginary screen and keep the computer and the iPhone running…running humanity’s errands even? Or is this master-slave dialectic to be replaced with a dynamics of friendship, one hinted at some time ago by Boris Arvatov, who advocated that things become our comrades rather than our tools? Or can cameras and other technologies become friendly only when we—like Radul and her comrade Brady Cranfield—have taken the time to program them ourselves?
II.
The last presentation of the day(3) left me even more confused, although initially, I had the clearest negative reaction to it. The aesthetic dilemma is somewhat more difficult to describe because it is all about the senses—the juxtaposition of sight and sound to be precise. In her presentation, Siri Frigaard, the first Chief Public Prosecutor and Director of the Norwegian National Authority for Prosecution of Organised and Other Serious Crime, showed us images that had been taken by perpetrators of heinous violence in East Timor—images of victims maimed and tortured. These photographs were presented under a loud cloud of Wagnerian music (Vengelis’ Conquest of Paradise to be precise)(4). Said score screamed emotional manipulation and thereby provoked aesthetic outrage. In my mind (and as I found out in the wrap-up session, in the minds of several other presenters), Frigaard’s attempt to promote justice led her to commit an aesthetic crime. We could all agree on the criminality of the deeds documented by these deeply troubling “trophy” images. (Though there is no easy answer to the question raised by Eyal Sivan as to why the perpetrator of a crime would take pictures of it.) But there was serious disagreement with Frigaard’s claim that she needed to include such music so as to induce the sympathy of a desensitized audience, who were so used to the myriad horrors of the world(5). The deep unease produced at this moment seemed to reveal the very heart of the matter placed on the red round conference tables that day(6). What I continue to wonder about is the degree to which several of the conference participants, myself included, were probably blind to Frigaard’s sensibility; and vice versa(7). What does this aesthetic impasse say about our broader faculties of judgment? Did the discussion turn to the music because we felt helpless to address the problems of the Timorese (in a certain confirmation of Douzinas’ argument) and therefore moved quickly towards that about which we could be more decisive (aesthetics)? It felt strangely good at the end of this stimulating day to say no to something and mean it.
The conference was a staging ground for a certain contradictions and irreconcilabilities: the denouncement of the screen followed by its necessity; the presentation of horrific and damning visual material drowned out by the sound which was meant to sensitize. On some level, these may be seen as overblown anecdotes. On another, they point to two conundrums that arise at the intersection of aesthetics, law and technology: How to locate the agency of technology? And how to make sense of another’s sensitivity, especially when it comes to transgressions of laws, written and visceral?
*
In closing, it might be worth mentioning the publication A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics (co-published by Henie Onstad Art Center and Sternberg Press), edited by Radul and Maarit Paasche, which was launched at the symposium and served as something of a primer for the proceedings. The book stresses the role of images as both legal proof and sensation. It contains several essays by legal experts, aesthetic theorists and philosophers(8), whose thinking combines to form a primer on the citizen’s and sensing subject’s relation to this intricate system of law. Case studies, often of famous trials as spectacles (such as Stalinist “show trials” and the trial of Adolf Eichmann), ground more wide-ranging deliberations, both on the nitty-gritties of legal procedure and the Olympic overviews of the legal system. Importantly, the volume of dense theoretical texts is framed by an equally dense flow of images at the very beginning and the very end, mostly of contemporary artworks. These aim to enact the de facto cross-overs of law, aesthetics and media technology; in other words, to represent complexity. Mounting the case for contemporary art as a system of representation meant linking this system to law and to democracy, as systems of representation. The statement that begins the book, “because none of us are outside the law,” states this cross-over most simply. Beyond this, it locks us into a system. But this is just the beginning, and subsequently, we are given several tools to navigate this prison house. I am still getting through this book and processing its lessons. In the meantime, it might be safe to say that my insistence on a visceral response to the conference and its contradictions should be stressed as a learned one. It is not a Bush-ite “feeling my way through” a multifaceted situation, so as to deny its complexity, but rather an attempt to use aesthetic coordinates as part of a matrix of rational reflection. In their introduction, Paasche and Radul invoke, “the law within as a profound sense of what can and cannot be said, thought and done.” What I have said about the conference in some part tries to obey its rules and in some part wants to break with the regime of intellectual reflection that often assumes a kind of non-sensing subject.
Monika Szewczyk, December 2011
Endnotes:
1: At last minute, Weizman was detained and could not come to the conference in person. The Skype-in was a solution, which I should note I have seen work very well in the past, though in this case, it was somewhat compromised by the speed of the Internet. Eyal Sivan therefore stepped in with a verbal account of the presentation, which he had witnessed in the past.
2: See Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question),” trans. Christina Kiaer in October, Vol. 81. (Summer, 1997), pp. 119-128.
3: This was the penultimate session as it was followed by a wrap-up discussion. And it should be mentioned that the Symposium itself had an extra day of deliberation in the form of a workshop on ‘the ethics of the perpetrator’ by Eyal Sivan, which resonated deeply with the very current processing of the mass murder committed by Anders Breivik in Oslo 22 July, 2011.
4: The word ATROCITIES in bold font, appeared at the outset of the slide presentation, before any of the images.
5: Apart from those gathered for the conference, she had shown the presentation to her students and colleagues.
6: I should note that the slightly absurdist touches of color in the décor of the symposium space raised, ever so subtly, this participant’s visual sensitivity.
7:Editor’s Note: Contacted to confirm her intentions Frigaard wrote that she aimed: "to introduce the audience to the realities behind the core international crimes, and to demonstrate that what we are dealing with is not only an interesting academic drill or exercise." And further, “I might also have used the words ‘wake up’, but since I was talking both of students and other audience, the last word (induce sympathies] will be the correct one.”
8: Douzinas, Sivan and Radul were cross-overs between publication and symposium, but there were also contributions by Julie A. Cassiday, Cornelia Visman, Richard Mohr, Peter Goodrich, Martin Jay, Piyel Haldar and Avital Ronell.
