Dave Young - Notes on Tutorial I

Net Art

Links:

• Power Structures
• Power Structures on Artbase

It's been a while since I've played with this project (and it seems it's not really running very well any more), but I think it's a good example of a work that visualises the distribution of power in networks. Perhaps Milgram's 'Small World Theory' is true when applied to the Power Structures database? The work illustrates how power/control tends to cluster in geographical space, as well as in the economic, corporate and social spheres, and is more successful for allowing a 'user' to investigate the connections on their own. As the user explores the connections between Coca Cola, Apple and Enron, for example, a surprising network of close relationships tend to appear, leaving the user to draw their own conclusions about the concentration of economic power in the United States and elsewhere.

Installation

The Milgram Reenactment (Dickinson, Rushton, Edler)

The Milgram Reenactment is, as the title suggests, a recreation of Stanley Milgram's most controversial experiment, and probably the one he is best known for, titled Obedience to Authority. The experiment required the "naive subject" to assume the role of a teacher under the guise that they were testing a kind of pavlovian conditioning as a mnemonic device on "student". The subject (acting as "the Teacher") was informed that the student was wired to a kind of electric chair, and that the subject would have to apply a voltage of incremental strength each time the student failed a test of recalling pairs of words.

In truth though, the subjects were naive to the fact that Milgram was really interested in whether or not they would obey the instructions of the authoritative figure (the scientist monitoring the experiment, played by an actor), in face of the knowledge that they were harming the student (also played by an actor) as the voltage increased.

The installation accurately recreates Milgram's experiment as a performance based on the original recorded transcripts. I am interested in the idea of recreation as a performance (as explored lightly in my work in trimester 1.2 and 1.3). In this case, the Milgram experiment is represented as the work of theatrical fictions that it really was in the first instance. During an extended real-time performance of the experiment at the Glasgow, gallery attendants were told not to let anybody out. The great recreation of the obedience experiment demanded a the audience to remain obedient: no smoking breaks, no fresh air, no drinks at the bar.

The issue of obedience is inescapable, even 40 years on, and with an audience that is in on the joke. A leaflet at the CCA gallery gives strict instructions: "You will not be able to leave the space unless in the case of emergency", "Turn off your watch alarm", and "Anyone using flash photography will be asked to leave".

Video

The Radiant explores the aftermath of March 11 2011, when the Great Tohoku Earthquake struck the North East Coast of Japan at 2.46pm, triggering a tsunami that killed tens of thousands and causing the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. In the fissures opened by these catastrophes, The Radiant travels through time and space, invoking the historical promise of nuclear energy and summoning the future threat of radiation that converge upon the benighted present. Under these conditions, the illuminated cities and evacuated villages of Japan can be understood as a laboratory for the global nuclear regime that exposes its citizens to the necropolitics of radiation.

I managed to see The Radiant during the Rotterdam Film Festival - while it may not appear to be directly linked with my current research, it did explore how the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric handled the "responsibility" of the failure of multiple safety systems in the Nuclear Power Plant, and the illegal clean-up process and disinformation campaign following the meltdown (eventually categorised on par with Chernobyl as a level 7 disaster) on the 11th March. According to the film, the highly radioactive soil was transported from the Fukushima region and spread around the entire country in order to lower the concentration of the radioactivity, but also as a means to distort control group statistics and comparisons with other regions in the future. In this way, the physical redistribution of the soil disguises its potency - which we can see as being a metaphor for disguising power through decentralisation.