A Technophile Dreams of Disaster: Kirsten Peterson
You do not have to identify as a technophile to be in awe of what technology has allowed us to see. From distant galaxies to intracellular activity, liquid crystal displays and imaging techniques based on magnetic resonance, the field of visibility has expanded exponentially as a result of technological progress. Much still remains invisible, though, and thus technology keeps tempting us with the elusive allure of an ever-receding frontier, where the feasible meets the imaginable.
Kirsten Peterson’s work is concerned with the issues of visibility and perception in the age of digital reproduction. Similar to the deep ambivalence expressed in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Peterson’s work is marked by an ambiguous attitude towards technology. Benjamin lamented the loss of the original artwork’s aura yet could not help being intrigued by the sheer possibilities of new, mechanically reproducible media. In the digital age, the promise of a theoretically unlimited pixelation of images collides with the coarse-grained loss of visual information that looms in every data file. But rather than lament disappearing details, Peterson has re-defined this putative loss as a new opportunity to imagine and see differently. In Infrastructure 1 (2006), for instance, figures pixellated to the point of abstraction suggest visual intrigue rather than digital degradation.
In her latest work, Peterson pursProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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s another problem of digitization: while technology has expanded what we can see, the way we optimally watch digital imagery is still confined by a narrow viewing cone, that is, the viewer’s position vis-à-vis a screen that provides a perfect view of the image. When seen from outside the viewing cone, the digital image degrades; variables such as luminance, chromaticity, and contrast suffer. But instead of striving for perfect perception, Peterson’s work invites us to look askew at the many screens we live with in this time and place, and experiment with what else we might see or imagine.
Given that we live in what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “the age of the screen” (66), embracing image degradations and distortions may seem like an enlightened approach to take toward inevitable digital phenomena. But Peterson’s work simultaneously points to the underlying problem this relative unreliability presents: trust. If there is only one perfect point from which to see reliably, the majority of possible perspectives will produce intriguing but not necessarily true and hence trustworthy perceptions. This loss of trust extends to technology in general and pervades Peterson’s work: in Untitled (Train) (2005), a figure wearing a protective suit and a facial mask gets off a train, providing us with a glimpse of what relying on public transportation in the age of global pandemics might come to look like.
The Infrastructure series, which Peterson has been working on since 2006, further pursues this line of inquiry: how trustworthy are the systems and structures we rely on in our everyday lives? In the age of planned obsolescence, when even brand new technological gadgets come with an expiration date, how wise is it to trust technology and those administering and controlling it? The range of disasters that technological progress has not helped prevent in the past few years is long: planes crashed into oceans, commuter trains collided, highway bridges collapsed, and the global economy plummeted into recession despite sophisticated prognostic models.
These events, though not literally represented in the Infrastructure series, nonetheless have left their mark on Peterson’s work. The central recurring motif is a shake table used in seismic research to simulate earthquakes. The table constantly reminds the artist and the audience alike of the limits of technological control: while researchers can study how structures fall apart and learn how to improve them, no simulation can ultimately hope to rein in the destructive force of an earthquake.
Five images of a gradually disintegrating structure on a seismic table, gleaned from the Internet, form the starting point for Peterson’s latest work. These images were scanned into a computer, where they became the blueprints for two-dimensional geometric models. In this step, clouds of dust and debris were eliminated, and each individual falling brick became visible. At this point, a three-dimensional plastic model of each stage of destruction was computer generated. Peterson photographed each of the models next, increasing contrast as much as possible. These photographs, enlarged to make individual pixels visible, served as the basis for a painting operation. Using acrylic gels, some of them containing liquid crystals, Peterson sought to capture the on-screen shades of color that result from luminance and chromaticity distortions. As they dry, the gels form peel-able skins, which Peterson meticulously cut into strips. These colorful shapes were attached to the back of a printing screen and layered to build up areas of high and low transparency. Finally, the screens are displayed in custom-built metal casings that, protruding from the wall, are designed to remind of flat-panel television screens.
This almost absurdly labor-intensive process clearly does not exclude technological tools but emphasizes the artist’s ability to manipulate the imagery and objects involved. Indeed, Peterson’s process gives new meaning to appropriation: in order to wrestle authorship, the artist photographs, paints, cuts, and pastes, performing actions that are oddly familiar from a computer’s image manipulation program, all in order to produce something that in the end reminds us of a flat-panel television screen. The point, though, is not verisimilitude. Instead, the point is to emphasize and thus make visible the screens, gadgets, and technologies we are surrounded by. Peterson’s work invites us to step out of our metaphorical viewing cone and to look at technology askance: to see the promises and the shortfalls, the possibilities and the delusions; to see the screen as a fascinating, fallible object in its own right.
When a technophile dreams of disaster, the outcome is no neo-Luddite rejection of all technology, but a thorough and speculative assessment of what technology can and can not do. The bottom line: even the smartest technology will not make us smarter. But it might just give us some cool stuff to look at.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “The Word of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217—252.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les pressesdu réel, 2002.
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