(JEMSHEED)
RESPONSE VIDEO + TRANSLATIONS
Translation Format #1: Powerpoint for Global Art Forum 6 at Art Dubai 2012, at the request of Victoria Camblin
POWERPOINTING™ YOUR CREATIVE MEDIUM POTENTIAL (CMP)
PowerPoint is omnipresent. From bored boardrooms and continuing education seminars to military briefings at the Pentagon and in Kabul, with art fairs in between. Editor/art historian Victoria Camblin has curated a special series of PowerPoints, created collaboratively by contemporary artists, writers, creative entities and duos, that celebrate, critique and creatively exploit the medium's strange, story-telling familiarity.
Featuring Douglas Coupland (Keynote), Ayshay + Kari Altmann, Goldin & Senneby, LuckyPDF and Alexander Provan (Triple Canopy).
Available to browse in the Forum-Forum.
Through the abstracted framework of a promotional corporate slideshow, the product of "Jemsheed," a devotional love song by Ayshay (Fatima Al Qadiri), is revealed. The nonsensical glyphs created by human response to touchscreen interfaces are presented as a new, hybrid, and alien language—unearthed from beneath the system of screens and images that technology uses to demonstrate and sell itself.
The repetition of the name Jemsheed in the song, like the repetition of hand movements onscreen, is an expression of devotional desire. The Powerpoint, made as a response to the music by Kari Altmann for Global Art Forum, posits this devotional yearning toward a technological system that aims for bodily control. The result of this new interaction creates a new language, whose glyphs appear like remnants from an unknown civilization, and suggest a relationship that is both distant and intimate.
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
Still from "Jemsheed" Powerpoint Translation
The primary clips in each frame are lifted from promotional videos that demonstrate touchscreen interfaces. We see the anonymous hands of users demonstrating, calibrating, and attempting mastery of touch-enabled tablets, car dashes, and lcd panels, all of which have been designed for very specific hand interaction. The clips, too, are designed to show very specific things about the product in the frame, which finds these user's hands responding to implicit directions and goals dictated by larger systems, despite some of the more freeform, even "expressive" or "incorrect" movements.
Above these clips, a tracing of what each hand's contact has left behind takes the place of where the text element might be in a normal Powerpoint slide.
Mixed in are more contextual graphics of exotic leather and snakeskin interiors, a blue l.e.d. usb laptop fan placed on top of a rock that looks like an ancient cave with sci-fi elements, stock promotional graphics like abstract fire and cgi sand that nod to the geographical elements of both the music and the location of Global Art Forum while commenting on their distance, and a repeating loop of a stark sand dune in light rays that move in time with some of the main chanting in the song, appearing in each frame as a kind of logo. We also see footage shot from underneath a multitouch table at the start, with a purple ring graphic mimicking the purple power button of the device, and a slowly opening dash compartment at the end that seems to house a hidden usb plugin. In each of these beginning and ending shots, we get a peek behind the screens and veneers which are promoted in the other videos. Like finding these glyphs in the interior space of a tomb or an exotic car, we can imagine them excavated from inside a larger system of production that requires complete devotion. Each glyph is a mix of control and the desire for something "else" that the body expresses in contact with an external force.