The work of artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall is a major contribution to the understanding of media and communication technology and its impact on the human being and the visual arts. Drive will remain as a privileged document about artistic thought in the nineties, of a deep change in the concept of art, media and life. But the central issue of this book leads much further: Crandall offers a coherent theory of the individual, its redefinition through the media space and through worldwide communication networks. Drive is about thinking the image and the status of the human being in the age of Internet and of globalized mass media. Under these conditions, Jordan Crandall is pushing forward two main philosophical investigations of the seventies and eighties: Gilles Deleuze's concept of "Rhizome" and Michel Foucault's analysis of the subject at the interface between technology and the body.
--ROBERT FLECK, Independent critic and curator, director of Graduate Studies at Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes

Jordan Crandall has the mind of a pragmatist and the heart of a utopian. With astonishing breadth and rare lucidity, he calls upon psychoanalysis, film theory, semiotics, and demography to expose the insidious political and economic forces that structure and control the "body-image-machine complex." While sketching a chilling image of the intersection of the ascendant database paradigm with military technology and globalized commerce, Crandall does not succumb to cynicism or fashionable passivity, but presents an urgent case for the possibility of "new identity formations and agencies." In his art, writing, and editorial work, Crandall has fashioned a critically important survival guide to the emerging present.
-- LAWRENCE RINDER,, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum, New York

In Drive, Jordan Crandall boldly re-figures the fundamental metaphors guiding our interactions with digital media, including "pages," "nodes," and "links." He adopts instead the idea of a differentiated field that includes computers, networks, users and physical spaces. Working from this premise, he shows how the metaphor of the vehicle, imagined both as a transportation device and as a semiotic-linguistic entity, can be used to re-think our embodied relation to inscription technologies and particularly to digital media. Richly imagined and powerfully argued, this book has the potential to revolutionize our discourses about media and consequently the possibilities we can envision for them -- and for us.
-- N. KATHERINE HAYLES, Professor of English and Media Arts at UCLA and author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Between machine vision and a database, between art world, critical theory and new media, between a screen and a mobile vehicle, between art practice, writing and net-dialog, between the network and the cinematic, between theory and visual poetry -- Jordan Crandall's works strike at the most critical conceptual knots of our computer culture.
-- LEV MANOVICH, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at University of California San Diego and author of The Language of New Media

Today, Jordan Crandall's urgent voice demands to be heard. His work in media theory compels us to recognize the extent to which our consciousness is formed, manipulated and maintained by a range of technologies extending from those associated with image production to those constructing and managing ubiquitous networks.
-- DAVID A. ROSS, former Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Jordan Crandall's reflections on the relation between "technological facing," sensorium and subjectivity update Benjamin's and Deleuze's insights as vision and desire are wired in imaging technologies produced for Hollywood and the military. Crandall's fusion of film and military-driven "strategic seeing" is not the stuff of science fiction but a deconstructive replication of the military-industrial-entertainment complex's invasion of our perceptual processes.
-- GEORGE YUDICE, Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University

Drive is highly relevant to the shifting and turbulent terrain of global conflict, desire, and surveillance. A deep dive into our bodies as language systems, territories, and senses, Drive is luscious, threatening, and totally riveting. It throws down the gauntlet.
-- SARA DIAMOND, Artistic Director, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada

Jordan Crandall's Drive articulates that moment when the locus of our experience of the world shifted from the stable corporeality of the body to the interpenetrating fluidity of technological space. His provocative writings express the disorienting detachment triggered by the splintering of information, communication and materiality into layers of mediated perception. Through the interlocking systems of military surveillance, artificial intelligence and digital manipulation, Crandall constructs a disturbing theoretical and poetic enquiry into the absorption of the body into the intimate infinity of electronic cyberspace.
-- CHRISSIE ILES, Curator, Film and Video, Whitney Museum of American Art

Drive resists either cybernetic or science fiction scripts for digital culture that often invite an indulgence in parallel or recursive realities. For Jordan Crandall, digital devices are simply a new set of interfaces and switches in the larger colloidal field of everything else, and so they are about the material within which they are embedded -- our bodies, our larger marketplaces and networks, and our daily theaters of operation. Discussed as animations or activities, as verbs rather than nouns, these technologies are passages between "interior and exterior rhythms," and they both ventriloquize and receive life beyond their own boundaries and capabilities. However invisible the may be, they are the measured by the huge spaces they calibrate, spaces controlled by commerce, by the military and by millions of other voices. These very spaces that are both intrinsic and extrinsic to the digital are Crandall's sites, not only discussed but occupied, in installations, objects, online forums, essays and special publications.
-- KELLER EASTERLING, Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Yale University and author of Organization Space

What characterizes this important work as a whole is its grand human scale and its attention to new phenomenologies of embodiment and subjective experience. In Drive, Crandall makes a realm of surveillance technologies that operate largely below the threshold of conscious awareness felt in erotic choreographies and rhythmic uses of imagery. Fresh theoretical categories emerge out of this art.
-- MARGARET MORSE, Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California Santa Cruz and author of Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture

Jordan Crandall demonstrates and examines the centrality of artistic practices to understandings of networked societies, developing an engaged and analytic critique of both. Drive traces the development of Crandall's work, both in the context of his participation in the seminal Blast series and in his developing engagement with, on the one hand, path-breaking installation art and, on the other, the collective generation of critical knowledge through online discussion. Working in key sites of modern cultures -- technology, sex, bodies, cyberspace, oppressions -- Crandall develops work of essential interest to anyone concerned with artistic practices or the world as we currently live in it. Drive is thinking at its finest.
-- TIM JORDAN, author of Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet

As both artist and media scholar, Jordan Crandall has consistently demonstrated how technology, the media, and our corporeality have become intricately and inextricably enmeshed. In this significant volume, Crandall straddles Virilio and Schopenhauer especially when he approximates the packet structure of our contemporaneity through the brevity of the aphorism. A most welcome contribution to our understanding of the confluence of technology and culture today.
-- OLU OGUIBE, Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Jordan Crandall is an artist, writer, critic, editor and digital "agent provocateur." This publication assembles, for the first time, his dynamic and critical interventions into the worlds of art and new technology over the past decade. These interventions have, in different ways, mobilized diverse bodies and embedded them into the discourses of contemporary art and digital media, positioning the body as a "hybrid real/imaginary, physical/digital construct, enmeshed in embodying and integrating forces." This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to gain insight into some of the most important contemporary practices and debates around the body, difference, and technology.
-- GILANE TAWADROS, Director, Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London

Jordan Crandall has led the way for critically understanding technology in constructing representation, and in its critique, revealing not only aspects of our experiences but a fundamental shift in our sense of self.
-- MARY JANE JACOB, Independent Curator, Chicago

Jordan Crandall's Drive is just the sort of intervention that our tech-besotted culture needs after the bubble burst. Integrating image, text, and provocation, Drive provides a self-aware, yet never solipsistic synopsis of Crandall's art projects and a series of compact ruminations on the imbricated networks of culture, technology, and power.
-- PETER LUNENFELD, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design, and author of Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures

Drive is a toolbox for thinking. It combines pristine analysis, holistic understanding, and operational effectiveness in a pulsating search for the possibilities of today. Drive refuses the limits of technicality and continuously aims to address the whole complexity of awareness. It sketches how to critically perceive - and thus enjoy and activate - the possibilities that arise from a globalising world. Staying close to experience, Drive becomes political in the broad sense; it challenges the reader to deal with the global as specifics.
-- BART DE BAERE, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art of Antwerp

Drive takes its passengers on a provocative tour of "portable vehicles" for rhythmic and spatial interaction in electronic and digital space. A collection of documents and writings by Jordan Crandall about his pioneering projects in art installation and digital culture, from Blast to Drive, this bookish vehicle energetically investigates the public manifestations of electric intimacy and digital interiority. Crandall electrifies the reader with his artistic cartographies and theoretical relays between private desires, exterior movements, and public technologies of registration.
-- TIMOTHY MURRAY, CoEditor of CTHEORY Multimedia Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video at Cornell University

Not content with constructing a typology of the post-industrial subject that paradoxically tends to surpass the very category of the subject, Jordan Crandall articulates his practice around the question of how such a lack of subjectivity could, nonetheless, resist -- or better, what "resistance" would mean in a post-industrial context.
-- CARLOS BASUALDO, Co-Curator of Documenta 11

Overexpose the nerve endings of the hyperreal, oversaturate the images of data bodies, overwhelm the violence of techno-culture with an art of profound attunement to its times, and you will have finally stumbled upon the matrix art and writing of Jordan Crandall.
-- ARTHUR AND MARILOUISE KROKER, Editors, CTHEORY

Drive drives us to face the new formats of that movement-connected hybrid machine called "human," in the age of information processing. Jordan Crandall critically captures the automatism of human-machine-image in the expanding database.
-- YUKIKO SHIKATA, Media art curator and critic, Tokyo

This fine publication is the first survey on the complex dynamic practice of Jordan Crandall, who shows us ways beyond the fear of interdisciplinarity. Or in the words of Gyorgy Kepes: the fear that we might be forced to give up vested interests, which has kept us from pooling our knowledge.
-- HANS-ULRICH OBRIST, Curator, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Jordan Crandall Drive
Hatje Cantz Publishers
Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz
ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlshrue

Introduction by Peter Weibel
Edited by Brian Holmes
English 262 pp., 189 illustrations, 125 in color, numerous graphs, 14.5 x 22.7 cm, softcover
ISBN 3-7757-1174-0
May 2003
http://www.hatjecantz.de http://www.artbook.com