DataBank - Agit Prop is a storytelling strategy.
It propels this cycle of SECRET multimedia productions. As a visual
and narrative grammar it does not ignore the incomprehensibility
of exploding data systems. Fifty years ago surveillance meant
“Big Brother”, and a “Dramatist/Artist ”
might well have used these surveillance files to fashion the “Script”
and be done with it. But fifty years ago when Baker, Hoover and
Winchell tangoed, the ceaseless accretion of digital information
and imagery were not part of the scene. Now they are.
Today it’s naïve to simply consign a surveillance discussion
to some flat normative/value-laden nowhere place. It is equally
naïve for anyone who is media literate to approach these
1950 era Freedom of Information files with the simple goal of
fashioning a tightly scripted dramatization or “a wall hung”
installation. Certainly there’s something satisfying about
sitting around the fire/stage and telling a start to finish surveillance
morality tale or gazing at the all consuming image. But in times
of virtual plenitude something else is needed to deal with all
those “all seeing eyes".
SECRET multimedia was first shown in conjunction with a projection
of text and images from Marshall McLuhan’s The
Mechanical Bride. McLuhan’s ground breaking new
media track was actually published in 1951, the same year Baker
and Winchell had
their run in at the Stork Club’s cub room. McLuhan wrote
about the cub room and the telegraphic rattle of Walter Winchell
in his Mechanical Bride. But it's not McLuhan’s mention
of Winchell that’s important, it’s his mention of
Edgar Allan Poe. It's Poe’s A
Descent into the Maelstrom that hangs above and plants
itself throughout
The Mechanical Bride. It also shadows SECRET. A
Descent into the Maelstrom is about two sailors caught in
a whirlpool, only one survives. Poe’s story offers a
bare survival strategy in the face of chaos - and McLuhan
grabs it.
DataBank Agit Prop is about a survival strategy. It is about wearing,
mapping and dancing with the data maelstrom. It was Josephine
Baker’s strategy.
