Rebecca Schneider: More Wrong Things

Abstract

In Carolee Schneeman’s 2000-01 [cough] video installation, More Wrong Things, hundreds of wires tangle a viewer in a web of technology simultaneously providing and limiting access to images on 24 monitors that run clips of myriad personal and political disasters in a continual loop. From a dripping faucet to exploding bombs to cancer treatment to cat scratch, the “wrong things” accumulate and compete for [cough] attention. Fifteen years old now, this artwork seems quite dated, as does much of the [cough] work Schneemann has made over fifty years of art making in which, calling to a Paleolithic Goddess, she has often been accused of being naïve, aberrant, messy, wrong, hopelessly out of date, and [cough]. And yet, as I have asked elsewhere in my own [cough] work, what does getting it wrong get right? If Schneemann’s More Wrong Things seems dated, it also seems strangely prescient. At the dawn of “big data” (a phrased that first showed up, we know via data collection, only three years prior), the piece modeled an ecstasy of information flow mired in its own thrall to access, generating  over-saturation and a simultaneous Medusa effect as if turning her spectators to stone. To what degree is error (a category, perhaps, of “wrong things”) tangled in historicity, like Schneemann’s unmanageable and screamingly obsolete video cords? Her work seems to ask: is error interruptive, or business as usual? In what way can error enable something of a temporal lag that might trip us, like a misstep or a stumble or a sidestep or a theatrical gaff, out of our otherwise seamless participation in those flows of cultural habit we might better want to critically question: from data-mania to preservation obsession to linear time to capitalism’s accumulation machine? From identity, patriarchy, structures of racism, war, waste, exploitation [… here collect more wrong things and more and more]? In other words, can we conceive of the labour of small [cough] error in relationship to big data?  I hope to engage the work of other [cough] artists to illustrate the [cough] gift of error in vehicles of circulation that aim not necessarily to preserve history to predict a future, as in big business’s approach to big data’s big archive, but to change history for future change. Please note, the coughing has rendered one specific word inaudible. We might discuss whether to mine the hidden word or leave the cough in place. Is it desirable to predict what we will choose?