this is me.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/j4a8re
“Video Projection on Spacialization (for Dan Graham)”

Proposal
A simple arrangement (right now I'm envisioning it in the AMS SUB gallery space, but it could technically be placed in any relatively open location, with some minor modifications; Given funding, this project would be more successful with more space to manipulate, like in the Belkin for instance):
1.A video projector and DVD player
Facing the wall (painted white), looping my film [called “Untitled (Robbins Barstow)”] from a short distance. In a non-protected space, if it was outside the gallery setting or otherwise unsupervised, the projector and DVD player would have to be placed in a video lock box of some kind, such that projecting could continue continuously.
2.An artificial wall
Erected in the center of the gallery space behind the projector (this could simply be a single layer of chipboard but a full 8 inch false wall would be best); alternatively, this wall can be substituted for any screen or curtain that will demarcate the space behind it where the video will be playing.
Another possibility would be to re-site the installation into a more appropriate space with a more narrow entranceway and without windows (this would be the reason for displaying the piece outside the gallery). As long as the third element could effectively be installed, this element can be ignored and is secondary.
3.A false ceiling
of simply construction; the easiest method would be to drop roofing cage and use ceiling tiles or suspend it via wires. The ceiling would have a slight but noticeable pitch towards the opposite wall from the constructed wall, such that it had the reverse proportions of a typical black box/movie theatre: with a large back wall and small front wall. The ceiling should be hung low enough such that viewers will be uncomfortable the closer they move to see the projected video. Viewers should be able to sit with the ceiling just above their heads in the front row, but stand when they enter.
4.Chairs will be set up in two or three rows; if viewers sitting in the front row will effectively block the projected image with their bodies.
5.Two microphones will pick up diagenic sound from the audience, picking up the sound of their movement and chatter (the video will be silent). This sound will be replayed on two speakers after a 25 minute delay to correspond to the videos length (approx. 30 minutes). Eventually, the noise inside the space will form a continuous texture of loops and new sounds, such that the viewers, if they stay long enough will hear their own voice but otherwise will only hear those that watched the video before them.

Space and Otherness: an artist's statement
Treatment of the other is a vital component of modern liberal democracy. This advocacy for celebrations of difference and inclusion at all costs has extents, of course, to contemporary neoliberal postmodernism, and has been amplified in some discourses (even those that one might expect to challenge such notions of the dominant state, post-structuralist philosophy and feminism). However, modern and postmodern treatments of the other vary significantly.
Modernist treatment of the other typically revolved around a concept of democracy which heavily emphasizes consensus and therefore inclusion of some kind or another. However, modern democracy itself is the example of bureaucratic biopolitical agent par excellence. So despite the well known notions of equal liberty, the people of a nation, etc., the modernist democratic state solely regards the other [the disempowered, the marginalized, etc.] purely as a subset of the total population, as mere bodies at the periphery of visibility, and as such at the periphery of its concern.
Perhaps at this juncture it would be useful to integrate two conceptual figures that have helped me think of the treatment of the other in modern democratic states: the fool and Kafka's hunger artist.
The first, the fool, which has its origins in medieval monarchies, but for my purposes here will be defined as the figure directly appended to a sovereign, the other-included.
The second, the hunger artist, derives from Kafka's eponymous story, and stands in direct opposition to the fool as that other-which-cannot-be-included, for it stands outside of the structure of inclusion itself. In other words, since the hunger artist survives solely as an externality to the world of culture in the story, he cannot be recognized as such, as an artist, for that would destroy the illusion that the other-included was itself already the periphery and that no externality as such existed. As Kafka's story demonstrates, this externality however often resurfaced in the modern state, contrary to the dominant ideology of biopolitical democracy.
So to return to the previous discussion, we can see that the majority of the marginalized other was expressed as the figure of the hunger artist, but was regarded primarily by the modern states as the figure of the other-included, the fool. This configuration is the dominant method by which the other., in the form of pure externality, is 'erased'.
As becomes immediately apparent from the two figures, fool and hunger artist, both of which are defined by their bodies, the other is quickly reduced to a state of bare life, and as such can be reduced to the figure of homo sacer. The fool historically speaking, literally has taken this role: the other appended to the sovereign whose life is constantly endangered since he lives at the whim of the court. The hunger artist of course is the true figure of bare life, because his life itself, his body wasting away, is the sole definition of his character. Homo Sacer is the dominant figure of the neoliberal postmodern state. The biopolitical democratic system continues uninterrupted but a new recognition of sovereignty embedding in the consensus-driven democratic process has been fore-grounded. Those subsets of the population, represented by the figure of the fool, now become central to the ideological position of the state, that depends on the maintenance of an identitarian classificatory system. So the other-included, on the basis of their being placed into this classificatory schema, are given recognition and power: they metaphorically take the position of homo sacer, playing the king (or Obama playing president), while the bureaucratic biopolitical mechanism, which in fact guarantees the exclusion of the subsets of the population to its periphery, is maintained. As we have discussed in class, as the technologization and media-saturation of the discourses increases as they become embedded in neoliberal network structures (and as such, become more and more disembodied and despatialized), the emphasis for inclusion, paradoxically, becomes embodiment itself. This is directly the inheritance of the underlying biopolitical mechanism of the neoliberal state.
In regards to my piece, perhaps it would be beneficial to discuss another an essay that was important in the nascent periods of my conceptualization of the installation. The essay, entitled “'Loser wins': Outsider art and the Salvaging of Disinterestedness” by Julia S. Ardery, examines the emergence of the new field of outsider art in the mid and late 70s in the US, in regard to what she calls “the ethos of disinterestedness.”1 Invoking Bordieu's concept of disinterestedness as the “inversion of ordinary economies” of specialization, Ardery describes how technologized artists (those that had gone to art school, had commercial interests etc.) could only gain credibility by masking that technology itself, as the old modernist modes were being questioned and devalued. Thus they posed themselves as the retainers of the modernist principles, reasserting authenticity and originality, in a word, disinterestedness, by searching out and promoting 'outsider artists' (art outside art), thereby reaping their credibility gained through honest production without training or desire for money through association. These figures, originally deemed essentially invisible by the modern democratic state, as pure externality, mere bodies, were, in the typical reversal of neoliberal postmodernism, reinstated as the central force for the maintenance of modernism itself, proof of the endlessly creative substratum of American art, proof that although perhaps rough and uncouth, art literally came up out of the soil (i.e. through the miserable body of the tormented artist) and was not a self referential, conceptual activity.
Thus for the video that forms the centrepiece of my installation, “Untitled (Robbins Barstow),” I metaphorized this structure of appropriation to directly foreground it: I utilized two 'found' film works by the amatear filmmaker Robbins Barstow, showed in conjunction, cut to an alternate timing which beyond my choice to frame them together (and to show them at all, for that matter) was my primary tool of manipulation. Both films foreground this inverted economy of bodies and technology, which I hope will resonate with the audience in their uncomfortable position in the cramped and strangely constructed theatre. However, my wish is not to continue the action of emphasizing embodiment via a mediated technologized means, but as the physical nature of the theatre structure demonstrates, a truly physical structure of control, highlighting the importance of the figure of homo sacer, and bare life.
In the darkness and discomfort of the theatre space, I don't invoke the modernist dream of an audience united by a shared cultural background, but in fact the opposite: the spontaneous realization of a community that extends across cultural difference of the inconsistent multiple that the audience enacts, immersed in a diagenic sound environment that they have the power to manipulate. In fore-grounding the link between the techno-network and the embodied other, I hope to allow new alternatives to arrise by a renewed spatialization that destabilizes homo sacer as other by creating a close environment for an audience to identify and dis-identify with the represented other.