INVESTIGATING THE
PERFECT CRIME
Exhibition of Circumstantial EvidenceThis project is based on my MFA Thesis Exhibition from March 2020. The show was installed for what was to be ‘open to the public’. Instead, it was up for one night in order that a select group of adjudicators could evaluate it. The school, Ontario College of Art & Media University, announced their Covid lockdown the following day, thus closing the exhibition without anyone having seen it.
STATEMENT
My interdisciplinary practice explores cultural phenomena through its visual coding of symbols and representations. Investigating the Perfect Crime is informed in part by my experience on the inside of film culture as a director of Crime-TV episodes over a period of ten years. This exhibition looks at the phenomenon of data creation, accumulation and its effect on human life. I take my lead from Jean Baudrillard’s book, “The Perfect Crime, The Murder of Reality”, identifying real to virtual transformation as a crime. With the murder mystery as my conceptual model, I employ experimental strategies to link the diverse sources of my research in order to make associations between them - in juxtaposition. Rather than trying to solve the crime or establish a specific narrative, I use the crime as a lens to examine the nature of data, the machinery that processes it, the corporate-political decisions determining its use and the evolutionary effects on humanity itself. Is the murder of reality a paradox? Is there a complete elimination of the real to create a unipolar, disembodied humanity?
THE EXHIBITION
NOTICE AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE EXHIBITIONThis is the story of a crime – the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion – the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality. Jean Baudrillard
Perpetrator-Victims
Series of 4 photomontages, 24X32”ea. inkjet printed on brushed aluminium
In the foyer of the main gallery - humanity as data - is explored in a series of four photomontages resembling suspect photos on a police blackboard. A flat data figure is set against a wall of flat data representing the collapse of duality.
Conflicting Timelines
Three representations of time – brush and ink, inkjet prints on photo paper
Arrow of Time 2019, 22X72” - Virtual Time 2019, 36”diametre – Duration 2020, 30X36”
Aristotelian present time was attached to the natural world, ‘the realm of change’. Newtonian time was absolute; it passed regardless of what happened in the world and was the same for everyone. Bergson’s ‘Duration’ saw present time taking place in intuition, the non-space realm of imagination. Prigogine used an astronomy symbol, the ‘Arrow of Time’ to illustrate ‘becoming’. Baudrillard described digital time as going in opposite directions simultaneously. Which time system should be applied to the perfect crime?
Becoming Data
Video Projection -- 42-minute loop (In collaboration with Andrew Kostjuk)
Video Projection South Wall
42 min video loop — with sync audio
B&W Surveillance Footage Featuring X3NO
(with thanks to Andrew Kostiuk)
Jail Bars — Gobo Effects
20x28” wooden frame, pvc pipe, black sheer fabric
hung from the ceiling, positioned in front of projector lamp
Murder or Becoming?
Video Projection — 2 min video loop
On the east wall of the black box, another high video projection portrays the image of a shadow overtaking its host. It is an image used by Baudrillard to illustrate his theory about virtual reality overtaking physical reality. He took McLuhan’s notion of “discarnate mankind” a step further and applied Harari’s prediction that “algorithms will decide who we are and what we should know about ourselves.” Is this proof of the perfect crime? Or is it an image of human evolution unfolding? The video representation features the shadow of a figure moving from behind it and eventually overtaking it.
Hacking Humanity
Table, Metal Cage 20X24X17”, Electric Turntable,
500 cardboard cut-out figures, LED button lights
Looking like the apocalyptic consequences of the perfect crime, a cage containing five hundred miniature figures is in constant rotation. It is a three-dimensional representation of Yuval Harari’s notion of “technology hacking humanity”, featuring people as one-dimensional, pure data beings trapped in a data continuum. Sound Effects accompany the rotating cage: emanating from within the cage (a hidden mini-iPad) is the spatial audio of ambient crowds, giving voice to the multitudes in the cage.
Life Data Recorder – Do Not Open
Steel, aluminium cylinder, 20X10X10”, plastic container 36X20X18”,
simulated seawater, red signal light 2X1/2”
On another table, a sealed transparent artefact filled with sea water contains an orange cylinder-shaped strongbox with its identification seen through the water: “Life Data Recorder – Do Not Open.” This reference to the aircraft ‘flight data recorder’ or black box containing the digital history of the flight, becomes the representation of an individual’s lifetime as data stored in its own container and living on after the flesh and blood of that individual has ceased to exist. Does data have shape or mass? Is this what becomes of our data after the murder of reality?
Comments by Members of the Adjudication Committee:
“a sophisticated notion of contemporary issues in art”
“an enjoyable and intriguing visual riddle”
“very carefully designed and professionally executed”
“revealed the depth of material realization and conceptual underpinnings”
“a range of sources from French post-structuralist philosophy to science and media”
The pieces in the exhibition were documented in a five-minute video: