Night Vision

Curated by Joy Garnett

February 26 - April 3, 2002

ARTISTS: Jordan Crandall, Christoph Draeger, Joy Garnett, Adam Hurwitz, Bill Jones & Ben Neill, John Klima, Joseph Nechvatal, Jonathan Podwil, Radical Software Group

Night Vision takes its title from the high-tech optical apparatus used in nocturnal military operations, whose greenish glow has become increasingly familiar since CNN's televised transmission of the Persian Gulf War one decade ago. The strategic advantage afforded by technologies that can penetrate the night provides the central metaphor for this exhibition. “Metaphors infiltrate real living,” states the accompanying catalogue text by Tim Griffin; likewise, the works in Night Vision may shed some light on the murky implications surrounding this theme.

Walter Benjamin wrote that “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” In Night Vision, the symbolic lens refers to actual technologies co-opted by the artists experimentally, as well as to documentary sources or subjects used for reflection and analysis.

Night Vision showcases work by artists and art collaboratives based in New York and in Brooklyn. Employing a variety of media, from painting, to video projection, to sound, these artists are deeply influenced by ongoing developments in technology: the science of optics in the service of both military and social objectives, and networks as extensions of intelligence and creativity, or as portals for infiltration, surveillance and infection.

—Joy Garnett