Drive

Drive is a video installation that combines traditional cinematic technology with new digital and military-based imaging systems. These include new tracking, identifying, and targeting technologies. Combining old and new, analog and network, civilian and military, Drive moves toward a post-cinematic language -- one that has specific historical and political resonances. Harnessed to escalating new technologies and embedded within warfare complexes both national and corporate, these new image systems do not so much represent movements as track them.

Moving between the cinematic paradigm and that of the visual database, Drive emphasizes the militarized complexes within which contemporary images are embedded, their emerging formats of regimentation, and the particular ways in which they ‘arm’ vision. It emphasizes the ways in which these forms and processes are deeply connected to changing patterns of perception and embodiment.

Alongside this militarized ‘strategic seeing,’ Drive marks an exhibitionistic impulse – a ‘seeing back.’ This impulse is bound up in new processes of identification, integration, and incorporation as sources of erotic pleasure. Drive looks at the new kinds of erotic worlds that begin to open up within what can otherwise be seen solely as a technics of control. These involve new couplings of humans and machines; new senses of intimacy and invasive pleasures that usurp private space; and new forms of simultaneously seeing and being seen – which are helping to change the contours of the body, its desires, and is sense of orientation in the world.