Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Race is On: Media and Ethnicity

What was once held to be an inalienable right - possession of a unique property called identity - has been irrevocably challenged by cultural theory. Now identity is thought to be a construct beholding as much to social and cultural forces as any intrinsic characteristics. A principal trait in the sum-total of individual make-up, ethnicity plays a large part in this equation but is itself a coloration tinted by a complex set of socio-cultural influences, not the least being the array of identifying images. How individual identity and specifically ethnic identity is modulated by the omnipresence of media representations is the concern of many contemporary video artists. The three works in this program examine media and its intimate relationship to ethnicity from wildly different perspectives, but each with a cool, cautionary tone. In Alex Rivera's whimsically wanton "Papapapa" (1997, 28 mins), the artist tracks his father's immigration northward from Peru, paralleled by a similar journey endured by the simple potato. Once ensconced in the U.S., his father becomes a potato himself, but of a different order, a couch potato, as he saturates himself with images of affluence, mobility and nostalgia--nostalgia for the place he had left, now a set of beckoning images. While the father undergoes his cultural transformation, the potato continues its journey through the fast food industry, reconstituting into a chip that bears no marks of its origin. At the conclusion of this riotous tape, both South American immigrants, father and tuber, have been thoroughly absorbed by the image industry that has capitalized on their own ethnicity. Christiane Robbins's "Amidst the White Noise..."My Fifth Amendment Privilege" (1997, 27:30 mins) draws a trajectory between Roots, the most popular race-oriented program of the '70s, and the O.J. Simpson, a more contemporary ethnic extravaganza. Using an array of manipulated images, Robbins critiques these two televised events, concluding with an ironic twist--a surfeit of race becomes its own negation, creating from its mass a blinding whiteness. Visually, the work stratifies the frame, compressing television footage into three horizonal stripes that have been color-coded. Each stratum deals with a different chronology, past and present, and looks at media as it reinforces consumer culture and clarifies race. Described as an “experimental docudrama,” Amidst the White Noise... foregrounds the mass media's uncanny ability to efface ethnicity in the midst of its own production. Part of an ambitious series on perception, Tran T. Kim-Trang's "Ocularis: Eye Surrogates" (1997, 21 mins) looks at the technology of television as it looks outward surveilling the populace. Where the technology once reinforced acceptable behavior through the repetition of a narrow set of cultural images, the capture of images for disciplinary and corrective purposes takes on new import within identity formation. Exposing a broad selection of surveillance sources, Tran interviews numerous people about their encounters with concealed video coverage. What is the implication of the involuntary forfeiture of privacy? What happens to autonomy as our images circulate without our knowledge? The unintentional surrender of privacy and the intrusion of authority within public space leaves little respite for the individual. Tran leaves us with a bit of mayhem as ethnic gangs skirmish before a surveillance system. The footage becomes, at once, a testament to their morbid theatrics and a capture, now visual, but soon to be punitive. Videotapes courtesy of the artists and Video Data Bank.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "XII Videobrasil - Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica" [XII Videobrasil - International Electronic Art Festival]: from September 22 to October 11, 1998, pp. 45, São Paulo, SP, 1998.