Transactional Seeing and Becoming Flesh: Repurposing Militarised Vision in Jordan Crandall's Heatseeking. Issue 5 (1st November 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Medel, China
• Is Part Of: Third text. Volume 30:Issue 5/6(2016)
• Page Start: 420
• Page End: 436
• Publication Date: 2016-11-01
• Subjects: China Medel -- Jordan Crandall -- Heatseeking -- InSITE 2000 -- US–Mexico border -- racial visibility -- flesh -- kinesthetic -- cinematic -- aesthetics -- militarised vision; Art and society -- Periodicals; Art -- Developing countries -- 20th century -- Periodicals; Developing countries -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; 700.91724
• DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2017.1357896
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0952-8822

Abstract

Abstract: This article looks at the relationship between militarised vision and cinematic aesthetics in Jordan Crandall's moving image installation, Heatseeking (2000–2001), commissioned for InSITE, a series of site-specific art exhibitions at the US–Mexico border. Repurposing border surveillance technologies, Crandall's project interrogates the domestication of militarised vision and the production of racialised bodies as conditions of legality in the post-NAFTA borderlands. Drawing on theories of flesh and embodiment to theorise Crandall's moving image poetics, the author demonstrates that Crandall's project offers insights not only into the logics of militarised vision, but also modes by which visualisation at the border can become fugitive. Disrupting militarised vision through interventions into moving image grammars afforded by performance, spatialised montage, kinesthetics and sound, Heatseeking produces a mode of transactional seeing that emphasises spectatorial embodiment rather than visual legibility. Bringing kinesthetic embodiment to bear on repurposed military technologies Heatseeking produces sensations that make visible the flesh of movement, rather than racialised bodies.