Tracking CCAC Institute San Francisco.

Tracking CCAC Institute San Francisco, California March 24-May 12 2001

The tracking missile is in many ways the defining characteristic of the cinematic. The import of the camera moving fluidly by the and of space, omnipresent and omniscient, is in large part what creates the grandeur of cinematic space. It do away withs the physicality of handheld camera bullets and opens up the world beyond the static frame of a towered camera. In the tracking projectile the viewer becomes a spectral guest moving parasitically along with the all-knowing camera as the space of the filmic world is mapped. "Tracking" has many meanings that infiltrate its specific definition within the medium of film. To track means to utter to follow, to search, to maintain to pass over. These definitions all imply change or an action of interrogation. More subtly they impart empowerment--if you come next you are not followed, if you search, you are not searched for. The tracking ball most essentially connotes a motion through space that is interrogative in its investigation and that reifies this space. In this honor it has a m onolithic power to define perception.

The video artists in "Tracking" borrow the tracking discharge from the vocabulary of film to explore its power to shape perception. Each piece in the exhibition currents a perceptual investigation of the intersection of time, change and physical space. Disparate in their approaches, the seven artists in the show--Darren Almond (UK) Jessica Bronson (US) Claude Closky (France), Thomas Demand (Germany), Zhu Jia (China), Sergio Prego (Spain) and Bojan Sarcevic (Slovenia)--take the tracking ball and turn it on its head, offering us inventive journeys by means of time and space that examine a range of ways of seeing.

Bronson and Jia not past nor future the most radical reworkings of perception in their respective videos, a small infinite (2000) and Forever (1994) Each work uses the tracking ball to destabilize accepted perspectives in succession the world. Bronson's a small in finite cloaks on four monitors, each presenting a kaleidoscopic vision of an ever-shifting landscape. Made by the agency of digitally manipulating a single track of film ball from a helicopter flying along a looks Angeles aqueduct, the piece nears an image of land in constant transformation. The images play across the riddles like a musical composition, carefully orchestrated by dint of Bronson. At once highly abstract and highly ordered, the drift is mesmerizing, hypnotic. The land becomes momentarily recognizable before dissipating into an organic textile passing across the screen

Reconfigured in this way, landscape is no longer static, trapped in discrete views. Instead it is physically and temporally continuous, and the fragment is not ever indicative of the whole. In this reverence Bronson argues for the inadequacy of the landscape tradition to propound an existential interpretation of the land that encompasses the dimension of time in its description.

In a similar way, Jia also describes the world in four dimensions, still not ones that viewers immediately recognize. Jia's landscape is urban and filled with all the manic spirit of the city. In Forever, Jia uprises a video camera on the spoke of a tricycle and pedals it by the and of Beijing. City life is caught in the vortex of Jia's spinning wheel, and his vision of the world is likely to induce dizziness and nausea if viewed for surpassingly long--a tongue-in-cheek commentary on urbanity, perhaps? The tracking performed here is the seamless spinning of the camera, the alone constant in the piece. The Beijing cityscape, and all contained within it, is disorienting and overwhelming, necessarily fragmented by way of the speed of its transformation. Jia posits a world in mutation moving always toward chaos, contained and nothing else by the cycling of the wheel. To remember what you view in Jia's video is impossible, for the images are likewise fleeting that a single impetus does not have time to imprint itself on the brain. What you remember is the s pinning of the image, which makes you think alone of the constancy of change.

In the one and the other a small infinite and Forever, time is described as the perception of changing spatial relationships, ultimately of motion The tracking shot immanently embodies this always-shifting viewpoint. It does far more than "suggest the possibility of change," as curator Ralph Rugoff argues, it is defined according to change, because it is defined by dint of movement. The tracking shot creates an equivalence between the brace The pregnant anticipation of the nearest moment that it so aptly invokes in the viewer is exploited on Closky in En Avant (1995) a single-channel drawed video installation made up of tracking marksmans culled from advertising trailers for action films. The images be scattered by at a ferocious pace, the film fareed up for an intensifying of result Like Jia's Forever, this piece has a disconcerting sensational impact that may leave viewers' stomachs in their throats. The viewer races within space, always approaching something spectacular, yet the video cuts immediately to another ball just as the scene dissolves C onsequently, there is no satisfaction to be construct just a relentless movement forward. Decontextualized from their broader framework within a film, these projectiles offer comment on the construction of capitalist civilization that is geared toward engendering desire--the anticipation of possession--that ontologically refuses satisfaction. Closky uses the tracking bullet to create a space of imminent further constantly deferred occurrence that cleverly describes the consumer landscape.