Summary of Drive, Track 1

by Lawrence Rinder

Jordan Crandall’s 13-minute loop projection (super-8 and 16mm film transferred to DVD), Drive, Track 1, refers to some of the earliest experiments in motion pictures--i.e. Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photography--as well as incorporating some of the most sophisticated, contemporary motion-tracking and imaging technology. Crandall explores the theme of the moving image, grounding it in the recent history of the moving body. “I am interested in how these transformations of the image, of vision, and of the body, mediated by technology, are embroiled in new regimes of fitness, new formats of adequacy,” notes Crandall. “They involve coordinations between bodies, machines, and images. I like to see the image always in terms of this kind of body-machine-image cluster.” Specifically, what we see in Crandall’s piece are images of a well-toned male body flexing and moving through space, alternated with footage of pedestrians walking on an urban street. Another series of images represent what appears to be a night-time street fight or perhaps some kind of choreographed dance in a sinister-looking back alley. All of these scenes are occasionally interrupted by green lines and contours that overlay the images, recalling the kind of high-tech missile tracking controls familiar from news footage of the Gulf War. Crandall writes:

The video sequences in [Drive, Track 1] look at the phenomenon of movement both in terms of cinema--the set of conventions though which the world of movement has come to be represented--and in terms of new computerized tracking systems. In these latter terms, movement is represented by way of its processing through the mechanisms of the database. The format of the database floats above the cinematic image-field, combining with it to generate a new kind of moving image. Harnessed to new technological assemblages and driven by processing imperatives, these new images do not so much represent movements as track them.”

Drive, Track 1 produces compelling conjunctions of desire and paranoia, sensuality and sterility, and public and private space.