The Eighth iDisplacement
In the same year (1969) that Robert Smithson [momentarily] displaced patches of ground in the Yucatan with square mirrors (sounds plainly colonizing, put this way), he brought a dead deciduous tree into a gallery for Prospect 69 at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf in Germany. Double-sided rectangular mirrors were tucked between its branches and into the earth of its decaying root ball.
In the basement of the British Pavilion (2017), five handheld devices were arranged against the stalks of the notice trees clustered claustrophobically in a tight forest between the two-by-fours and weight-bearing construction jacks. On and activated, the green camera bead of one device glowed alert — the agency of the device exerted. With a shift in the viewer’s footing, the trunk of one of the signs would obscure from view this signal that the phone was recording what it was mirroring, but realised by the viewer or not, the device-eye would persist in its transmission, its recognition, its surveillance. This bead expressed a force not only within the device, but that pulsed in potential transmissions between a global network of other anthro-appended technological nodes.
An every-two-year international spectacle, the Biennale feeds off of a currency of anticipation, documentation, and buzz. There’s something uncanny about these utilitarian orderly-queue-facilitators stuffed together into forced overlaps, suspended at off-kilter angles, bands wrapped and hanging limp around the posts, the screens mirroring only the strips of light that manage to bounce off the worn grey posts jutting in perpendicular. This particular iDisplacement leads one to re-mediate a moment of conflated stasis, pause and anticipation folded in on itself. To remember and record, which is to say, to conjure a narrative version of this displaced in-between, is an exercise in abstraction and extrapolation.
The devices that guide and frame the state of waiting, and the devices that occupy the user in a state of waiting, are uprooted, stared at, pondered and, with a delay, captioned.
At least one device stares/listens back.
This post is part of a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Follow the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacements hashtag on Instagram to read and see the next instalments.
