our attention to what is generally excluded from view, what remains outside the screen; the tricks used to create suspense, stimulate emotions, or give the audience the feelings that they are witnessing something truly special. An event out of the ordinary, but inside, framed by the screen, a well-formatted representation of reality. In Twilight and Inertia the artist operates by reverting the terms of the dichotomy (ordinary, spectacular) and displacing them. Rather than making a commentary, taking a distance, or openly criticising it, the artist modulates and rearranges the material spectacle it is made of. He puts spectacle on the way of spectacle, so to speak: the stadium lights, the cameras, the forest – they are part and parcel of the production of spectacle. However, the way these materials have been dislocated and rearranged together make them look like obstacles in the way of the uninterrupted fruition of spectacle that too often makes us forget its constructed nature. Obstacles often bring us closer to the experience of a phenomenon than what we are commonly used to think. In the seventeenth century Italian Jesuit, physicist and mathematician Francesco Maria Grimaldi discovered the phenomenon of light diffraction. He let a beam of sunlight pass through a small opening in a screen, and noticed that the light was diffused in the form of a cone. He also observed that the shadow of the body placed in the way of the beam was larger than the one supposed by the rectilinear propagation of light, and concluded that the light was bent out of its course in passing through edges of the body. Through Grimaldi’s observation on diffraction, modern physicists discovered that light is made of electromagnetic radiations in the form of waves and not of particles. Diffraction is a phenomenon that happens when waves encounter an obstacle and are forced to change their trajectory, forming new patterns. Donna Haraway uses the metaphor of diffraction to describe a particular form of critical reading and writing that takes obstacles, such as our previous knowledge and experiences, as relevant information in the comprehension of a phenomenon. In this way, each obstacle is not only a problem to be solved; it also constitutes part of the answer. To critically engage with something, Haraway seems to suggest, is to consider and work through all the variables and other phenomena, including our bodies and observations, that stand in the way, interfere, compose or are linked to the particular phenomenon we are observing. In Twilight and Inertia the artist analyses spectacles and their mechanism by working through spectacle, and bringing in, or putting in our way, the devices, tricks and materials spectacle is made of. This gesture both reinforces and displaces spectacle’s entertaining function. Nothing extraordinary is happening in the video (Inertia) or in the forest (in
the case of Twilight), but actually what we see and recognise are bits and pieces of a reality that we have encountered before, the moment we’ve set foot in a stadium, gone on a hike in the mountains, driven at night in a non-illuminated motorway. And still, it is spectacle at work. Twilight and Inertia speaks back to spectacle; they adopt its language, and syntax. But by pointing stadium lights at a random portion of forest, by reducing spectacle to its raw material, making its rhetorical devices tangible, they tell us a story of entanglements, one in which the spectacular is bound to the ordinary, the event to the non-event. We become witnesses to the double life of spectacle, one in which the material world becomes a stage for the spectacle of the immaterial, and the virtual materialises in the unmediated, naked exhibition of technology.
NOTE 1. Karen Barad, “Intra-active Entanglements,” an interview with Karen Barad by Malou Juelskjær and Nete Schwennensen, Kvinder, Køn, Forskning, no. 1-2, p. 12.
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