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Against Memory: Encoding Visual Art, 1965/2005
Tung-Hui Hu
UC Berkeley
Abstract
In the 1960s and 1970s, concern about the complicity of images with market capitalism and state surveillance fuelled a suspicion of—or a turn away from—visual art. Conceptual films and artworks frustrated a viewer's immediate access to the image. This was a moment often characterized by waning faith in the public sphere—events such as the Vietnam War and urban "redevelopment" wearing at the idea of a stable definition of subject and community. Nevertheless, On Kawara and Hanne Darboven stand out as particularly private, even inscrutable artists. Kawara, best known for a series of paintings of the date and telegrams that declare "I am still alive," has been described as making "as much sense as copy scrambled through incommensurable computer programmes... in other words, nonsense." And Darboven's repetitive "sea of numbers" appears equally senseless: what motive would compel her to recompute each day of the year across hundreds of notebooks and binders?
It seems important to re-examine Kawara and Darboven now, because much of communications and media, and their associated privacy concerns, hinge on technology and the definition of "code," "scrambling," "encryption." These concepts stand behind whether the NSA can access our Internet transmissions, as a lawsuit against AT&T recently disclosed, even our legal identity as subjects composed of genetic code. But one case is of special interest to me: that of the 'infinite archive,' the archives designed to retain images in perpetuity, and the negative consequences for privacy. Surveillance cameras, after all, do more than see an image: they are mechanisms for recording and storing incriminating evidence. In other words, I suggest, the problem may be less pervasively being watched than pervasively being remembered.
In this paper, I first discuss Kawara and Darboven's prescient interest in encryption algorithms as a method of artistic production. I then argue these artists use this strategy to "reintroduc[e] temporality to information," as new media theorist Mark Hansen has put it, one that has consequences for the digital image in general. If the image is created to be always outdated, no longer permanent, could this be an alternative strategy of remaining private in an age of total visibility, of "unblinking eyes"? Can a digital image decay and slip from memory?
Biography
Tung-Hui Hu is the author of two collections of poetry, The Book of Motion (U of Georgia, 2003) and Mine (Ausable, 2007). He is also a PhD candidate in Rhetoric/Film Studies at UC Berkeley.
* On Kawara, Code, 1965, color pencil on paper, 28x20.5cm.