Homefront

Jordan Crandall

Homefront ,
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HOMEFRONT Surveillance, monitoring, and tracking technologies are not only media of control; they are media of self-reflection and self-awareness. There is a reciprocity between the way that control technologies function and the way that identity coalesces. Entertainment media (including the news) play a large role in this dynamic. // Homefront is about the identities that we inhabit in the contemporary world of surveillance and voyeuristic entertainment. There are two actors, a man and a woman, inside a reality-television set modeled on a typical suburban home. The roles they play are not stable: they switch identities and they also take on other roles that evoke the relation between actor and audience, or reality and representation. // There are 3 camera modes in which they are depicted. The first is a reality television mode, particularly of the live-action crime TV variety, which combines both policing and voyeuristic entertainment. The second is video surveillance. The third is a military gaze, evoked through tactical observation methods and image processing software. The reality-representation dynamic of each of these three realms - reality media, policing, and military - is reflected in the identities and interpersonal dynamics of the two characters. That is, the conditions of each medium fuel reality, identity, and action in integral ways, and these conditions inform the interactions, interior worlds, and fantasmatic supports of the characters. In this way, Homefront traffics between the formal, infrastructural, and psychological levels. It is not only about these characters, but the representational systems through which they identify and are identified. The actors are engaged in a continual process of projection and identification via the separation, confrontation, and re-appropriation of their images as "others." The actors try to "know" each other and themselves in the same way that we try to know something through these representations. // Within the climate of contemporary security discourses, I am interested in the mechanisms of desire, suspicion, and fear. The other as object of desire or as "suspect." The actors are desirous of each other but their actions are infused with a presumptive suspicion. Everyday actions carry ominous overtones; the stage is set for potential crime. A criminal unconscious takes hold, mediated by the conditions of observation. The actors analyze, deceive, and solicit one another (and themselves). They engage in pre-emptive strikes against one another, in a way that is paralleled by the temporal "buffering" of predictive technology. // The flows between the dynamics of the actors and the conditions of representation are exacerbated in the ebb and flow of the actor's seduction-combat. The character action leads up to a singular act of violence, in a way that reveals the conditions of the media and its underlying supports. The conflict is exteriorized. New fortifications arise.
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