Jessica Feldman

numerous individuals on the road is made entirely out of video footage with corresponding sound from the cockpit of an American F-16 fighter jet in Fallujah that a friend of mine found online a few years ago and downloaded from the website http://www.informationclearinghouse.info. The video since has been removed from the internet.  In my interventions on this footage, I was thinking a lot about the layers of distance that technology allows us from the viscerality and consequence of our actions, and the ways in which recording something, and viewing a recording of something, makes it unreal, surreal, fictional, and/or art. I am interested in the habits that various technologies (those that are designed to record/preserve and those that are designed to destroy) have of creating these disjunctures. In my mind, this is somehow colluded with the contemporary questions of believability that surround so much of the media that we now view as documentation, and with art’s potential to restore an ethos of critical viewing and listening. I also want to disseminate this history, which is unavailable now, and I distribute DVDs of the original footage at screenings of this piece.