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Jennifer Harris

Canada's entry in the
8th International Architecture Exhibition
of the Venice Biennale, 2002

Program notes
by John Knetchel:

CITY-IN-A-PIXEL.

Let me reiterate: Water equals time and provides beauty with its double. By rubbing water, this city improves time's looks, beautifies the future. That's what the role of this city in the universe is.
- Joseph Brodsky writing on Venice in Watermark.

Vencie is no mere city. The tight "cellular proximity" of its daily life and the dense stone of its physical forms encrypt a code that makes this city more than a city. For Brodsky that "more" is the ability to burnish time with its stones, to condense it into a cosmos through which a plentitude of temporal possibilities is released.

Brodsky's insight opens the triptych of artworks by Michael Awad, Eve Egoyan, and David Rokeby in NEXT MEMORY CITY. The triptych reads Venice in conversation with Toronto, a city of a profoundly different time and temporality, as the artists construct, almost one pixel at a time, an urban stage that fuses the life of two cities through high-bandwidth recordings of various types. each piece torques our time-sense, and together they form a mise-en-scene which performas the times of both, and yet neither, city. Here we discover an Inter-city, a place we may have intuited but until recently could not have seen, experienced, or even imagined.

Each of the three pieces has radical ambitions for pixels. In Awad's Chinatown, a photograph of Toronto's Spadina Avenue, the pixels move in tandem with the world they are recording (a moving-film camera winds the film, movie-style, suring the exposure, but the resulting image, filled with nothing bu movement, is a "still"), and trace the vectors of the atoms they represent. In Rokeby's Seen pixels possess memory and affinity. They die off according to algorithms. In strams of video signal these hyper-pixels shed a kind of temporal x-ray on the flows of Plaza San Marco. In Egoyan and Rokeby's Channel, arrayed pixels of sound preserve the physical volume of the objects the artists recorded in each city. The comparative dance and interpenetration of these sonic figures reveal the complex temporal character of both cities.

Michael Awad's Chinatown is installed as a life-size, urban-scale photograph (2.5 metres high by 40 metres long). It performs three kinds of time. The mechanical time in which Awad's camera (designed and built by the artist, adapted from aerial reconnaissance and high-speed photographic technology) operates is the basis for the work: the film moves through the apparatus, exposing one at a time each vertical strip of chemical pixels on the negative. The chronological time of life on the street takes place around and in front of the camera. Awad's technique is the overlap of these two modes: only those things that move relative to thep lane of the recording (people, streetcars) are captured. Stationary things (buildings, structures, background) are not recorded - they are smeared into oblivion by the movement of the film. So the last kind of time is the time-diagram this photograph is, where we see revealed the relative vectors oft he scene's mobile components.

Passengers on a streetcar, passing at a steady rate, register accurately. Pedestrians register according to their speeds and directions - an arm balloons into a spinnaker of fabric, two legs become a pair of tiny stilts. Someone strakes acrss the entire photograph in a banner of blue motion, another person is caught in a still moment peering inquiringly at the photographer. Her curiosity slowed her down and determined the shape of her recorded image.

When Awad's image was printed for the first time at the scale required for this exhibition he was shocked to discover how much information it contained. Awad's technique - mechanical, analog, chemical - captures vast and subtle data fields. But it required the digital intensification of high-resolution scanning and a large-scale laser enlarger to make these intensely saturated pixels bloom.

Independently of Awad, and using only digital techniques, David Rokeby has spent recent years creating video images that separate what is moving from what is still. Rokeby builds perceptual machines, and Seen is just one iteration of one strand of his work. Each of his devices engineers a subtle and often disturbing experience for viewers. A machine plays music "plucked" by body movements in an otherwise empty room. A computer speaks uncanny poetry about objects it has never seen before. Computers, suspended in midair, chatter and chant to each other.