Jordan Crandall Trigger

GUARD/SURRENDER

SHIELD/INVADE

DETECT/DECEIVE/DISPLAY

RHYTHMICIZE/PACE

ADJUST/ALIGN/FIT

EXPOSE/CAPTURE/EXCHANGE-RELEASE

MASTER/SUBJUGATE

EXTERIOR-FIELD-NIGHT

ZOOM IN to an eye framed by a viewfinder. PAN DOWN to a finger resting uneasily on the trigger of a rifle. Pulsing with tension, flesh pressed against metal, the routings of the combat device course through the body as the film courses through the projector. Careful breaths, quickening heartbeats, and the small vibrations of the finger mix with the staccato of the gear-driven celluloid. An eye locked on a viewfinder, a body held immobile, an image-target moving across the field of vision. What moves, how does it move, how can that movement be tracked, intercepted, recorded, re-presented? All of the moving elements synchronized in the explosive moment of "getting the shot." A target-object to be seen, saved, eliminated in a process of division: I/you, us/them, here/there. Body and machine meeting in a trigger device, awaiting the explosive act of engagement. Seeing-naming-firing. Perception orchestrated, positions and borders drawn, movements and forms contoured. A victim-picture captured in the routings between perception, technology, and the pacings of the body.

CUT TO a database, glistening with calculations, a slight contour of bodily movement coalescing across the grids. ZOOM IN toward the characteristics of a target. Coordination points adhere toward the recognition of a pattern. A knot of presence, subject to a network seeing. SOUND OF A "CLICK". Target grid and object align, body and representation fuse, snapped into place as in the clicking of a mouse-trigger. Speech halts, replaced by the sounds of a statistical array. An image captioned as in an old silent film. A figure made silent in order to instill a new kind of voice. A figure immobilized in order to instill a new kind of movement. A process of sensitization across the conduits of the network.

An identity construed
Behavior
"Suspicious Activity"
Data-materiality
Form-in-movement
Form-in-evasion
Friend/enemy distinction
Target

A fracturing and linkage of viewpoints across human and machinic systems. Networks of looks. Visual capacity dispersed and intertwined. A system of visual formats and orientations directs seeing, fixing the gaze. A struggle for coherency underlies the battle itself.

One war: to develop a cohesive field of perception and a renewed wholeness to a self-capacity under siege.

The armored organization of the self; the self contoured by its shields.

Recording-launching. Seeing-aiming-firing.

Infrastructures of body, dwelling-place, weapons, and visual technologies are coordinated. Calculations and processing rhythms combine with human rhythms and paces of representation. The beat of cinema, the pulse of computing capacity, the staggered rhythms of the network, combine with the multiplicity of rhythms of the body whether natural (hearbeat, breathing) or imposed (drills, habits, routines).

A security and defense apparatus becomes ever more deeply linked to, and an expression of, a cultural imaginary.

The weapons and optics mutate. They arise within the systems, continually shaped and internalized.

Provisional borders arise between the actors. Provisional territories they defend and invade. Boundary-making as an active process, shaping the contours of the self and other, mine and yours.

Battle as a process of forging shape. Battle as a process of channeling vision. Oscillations between object and target, image and artillery, sensing and shooting.

The male actors appropriate female positioning. They adopt strategies and pleasures of display, in conjunction with positions of surveilling mastery. This is not about sexual orientation. It is about a surrendering of armor, a temporary vanquishing of the masculine fear of penetration, the fear upon which visions of phallic mastery are built. The phallus as a shield. The shield lowered.

The gaze in film theory. The gunsight gaze of the fighter. The pilotless gaze of unmanned systems.

“Projectile Mode.” The camera operating as a bullet or missile.

Hunter and victim switch. Roles change. The victim is tied up, bound up in the power dynamics of the visual-rhythmic networks, partially given up to the other’s pleasure, offering himself, but in struggle. He solicits desire only to defend against it. He invites the look then retreats. He displays and deceives. His presence arises provisionally within.

A gesture, a gaze, is not a solitary thing. It is harnessed to the system, it has machinic adjuncts. It is backed by an apparatus of conquest and defense.

The actors are never sure of their roles as targeter or targeted. Eyes pull away to some other space or system that might be doing the seeing. They are aware of other systems through which they are seen; they are aware of the ambiguous roles of visualizers within the seeing-circuits. There is equally paranoia and pleasure; fascination and avoidance; self-consciousness and surrender.

Athropocentric, linear seeing is displaced into networks, and a new kind of visual/compositional logic arises. Each of these formats has someone/something doing the seeing, within a specific kind of body attached.

The speed of these flows and their networked efficiency constitute a force just as powerful as the artillery.

The camera-weapon, linked to its seer-fighter, helps to stage new occupations, marking places of war. Trigger click; camera click; the ‘click’ of system/subject alignment.

Calculations overlay the visual field. Across surveillance systems, databases, and sorting/matching protocols, forms begin to coalesce – forms that are recognized as bodies, groups, behaviors. A realtime flow aligns with, contains, produces a target. A suspect coalesces within a distributed capacity to fire upon it. A figure is said to be innocent, said to be guilty; said to be with us, said to be against us.

The militarizing of the civilian realm: A conditioning, an orientation of the sensorium, and the establishing of a civic vigilance allied to the needs of the institution.

The trigger fires me. The trigger through which I am fired.

Desiring-machine (partial, always coupling) vs. technological machine (a dynamic of regularized functions).

There is a sense of the actors’ being networked, their sensoria enhanced, their having access to ‘topsight’. The more topsight one has, however, the less ability there is to act. Action requires limits to knowledge. Some blindness.

There is a violent acting out of internal conflicts. There is the need to cast out the soft, chaotic part of the body: that which threatens cohesion. There is the need to eliminate that which may desire to penetrate. Fears: penetration and dissolution.

Flash Empathy: The feeling that the fighter, when looking through the targeting scope with his target sighted, suddenly knows his opponent in some essential way, like they are brothers. Like he can see his target’s soul.

The poles of desire: erotic merging vs. armored self.

ORIENT. Directing of sight, visual conventions that order data (perspective). ANALYZE. Breaking movement down into its component parts, in order to make those parts accessible to a range of recording, measuring, and analyzing devices. Marrying this against networked database systems. Collection, comparison, communication. OBJECTIFY. Representation of movement (film, aerial photography, charts) both in terms of reconnaissance and result. ALIGN. Aim. Subject/object positionings. INTERNALIZE. Internalization of movement (habit, routine, pacing, performative corporealization). Routing cycles. ARM. Backing with an apparatus of conquest or defense. INTEGRATE. Networking, sharing capacities.