In the Name of Kernel shown at Holy Fire. Photo Courtesy Y. Bernard
This post is not about Second Life, nor virtual worlds, indeed. But I think that In the Name of Kernel, the last work of the spanish artist Joan Leandre, matches many of the key points of this blog: the surreal, the creative misuse of the software, the impact of synthetic worlds on our imagination and life, the layered reality we live in. And, last but not least, I'm sure that this 10 years long work can teach something to many (avatar) wannabe artists.
The following interview has been commissioned by Rhizome.org for its Writers Initiative. Below you can find my short intro and the last question, concerning the video Song of the Iron Bird (The Flight Recording Series). You can read the full interview here.
Joan Leandre defines himself as a "media interpreter." Active as a video artist in the field of independent media from the early 1990s, he won international recognition from 1999 thanks to retroYou (RC) (1999 - 2001), a progressive modification of the parameters used to construct the 3D graphics of a car racing video game. With retroyou nostal(G) (2002 - 2003) he goes on to deconstruct a flight simulator. In both cases, Leandre utilizes software to subvert and re-write a powerful ideological machine, translating a rather conventional generator of reality into a medium for illusions. The Dr. Strangelove of computing, Leandre loves the bomb and knows its mechanisms well enough to transform them into the workings of a multi-layered ambiguous narrative, esoteric and seductive at the same time. This aspect of his work is apparent in his latest project, In the Name of Kernel (2006 - ongoing). The kernel, the heart of every operating system, becomes the myth around which coagulates a symbolic event combining travel literature, the alchemy tradition and science fiction, terrorism and conspiracy theories, programming and mountaineering, 3D modeling and satellite mapping, hallucinations and revelations.
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Coming to the video, two paths seem to cross the main narrative, which is centered around the sighting of light globe UFOs during a flight mission: the viewpoint from above of highly recognizable locations, from Disneyland to Chernobyl; and a close look at the strange humanity on the surface. This introduces another issue that seems quite relevant for your work: surveillance (from satellite surveillance to dataveillance addressed in the 7 Columns MEGA NFO FILE) and what we could call the politics of vision. Can you talk about that?
Those are two different layers in the video among many others. I didn't really think about it in terms of data surveillance as that comes very often out of the box and it might be obvious and understood almost as a must nowadays. I think about In Song of the Iron Bird, somehow as a glimpse of the future as much as a representation of machine pleasure. Perhaps the key point In the Song of the Iron Bird is the debris recovery from the simulator itself, hidden tiny objects such as the puppets you mention, hiding in the program libraries, too tiny to be seen, only present in some specific geographical areas, hard to see from high above. I took and resized them to a very big scale, made them visible. Same with other stuff, just took and slowly brought it to a higher scale. That is all, a balance between different recombined elements. There seem to be some sort of continuity, not at all a narration but a recombination transported by the video and audio streams. In words of the airplane's captain Prefect Fatal Error: "I love my 747, she's my personal queen. I love to let her fly automatically while smoking pod in the cop-kit. I ask then the passengers if they are into having a good ride and push the throttle forward. I take control and start a sharp descent into the landscape. There are a million flashing lights in the sky, all the aircrafts of the world flying in harmony. There are boats and cars falling from up-there and the smoky cabin tastes sweet. Passengers are now screaming of joy while we all together celebrate this piece of iron wonder. When we are back on earth we will show the picture of velocity and thank god for still being sort of alive."
Joan Leandre, In the Name of Kernel!: Song of the Iron Bird (The Flight Recording Series), 20'. 2006-2008. Courtesy Project Gentili, Prato
Go on reading.
Check out a short trailer of the video.
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