The Israeli Center for Digital Art [Digital Artlab] in Holon (IL) is unique of its kind in the region. Founded in 2001, the Center promotes creative and critical (new) media practices and usages of technology, whilst fostering alliances with local and international media artists and practitioners. In this respect the vision of the Digital Artlab is multi-focal, with one eye engaging with the artistic and theoretical (new) media discourse conducted abroad, and one eye directed inwards, locating its practice within the complexity of Israeli reality. It is the insistence of the Digital Artlab on working from a very situated perspective, one which grapples with the materiality of the socio-political fabric of the Middle East, that makes its function so seminal and necessary. Whether large international exhibitions, lecture series or activist events, the activities of the Artlab always stress contextualisation as a prime condition for interpretation. The idea that technology or art is neutral or universalist is of course long outdated, and in recent years much effort has been dedicated to releasing technology from its black box, and art from its white cube. The act of deconstructing the latter spheres of containment and revealing the ideologies scripted within them takes on an even more important role within a politically volatile region such as the Middle East.
Over the past year the Digital Artlab has embarked on a project with the title Hilchot Schenim, which refers to oral Jewish Laws (halacha), codified in the Mishnah Torah , pertaining to conduct between neighbours, division of property and boundaries. Choosing a project name that is firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, yet one that, when viewed through a contemporary lens, is very relevant to the current situation in the Middle East and beyond, is a characterising strategy of the Digital Artlab. Israel has always been regarded as an oddity in relationship to its Arab neighbours: a little Jewish bubble surrounded by Muslim states. Deemed »the only democracy in the Middle East« by some, an »illegal Zionist occupation« by others, the question of Israeli identity and its relationship to its Other seems to be as much in flux as its territory. Traditionally Israel’s gaze has looked westwards, towards Europe and the US respectively: towards the former because the founding Zionist pioneers came from »Old Europe«, particularly Eastern European countries; towards the US because of the contagiousness of American-style capitalism and the strong Jewish lobby. Somehow Israel has always set itself apart from the Middle East in order to distance itself from the negative connotations associated with the Orient, and ward off the contamination of its Other, its neighbour. It has in that sense performed (and still is performing to a large extent) a double orientalist move: in the first place directed at its Arab neighbours, the Palestinians, and Arab Israeli citizens; in the second place at Sephardic Jews, which have their origins in Arab countries. Within this context the question of who one’s neighbour is, and how this relationship of proximity is defined, becomes pressing.

Hilchot Schenim is divided into three chapters, each spanning a large exhibition accompanied by a series of lectures, performances and workshops. The first chapter (06.12.2003 – 28.02.2004) focused on creating liaisons with artists coming from countries within the Mediterranean or from what is nowadays so elegantly dubbed »the periphery«. I would like to focus, however, on the second chapter of Hilchot Schenim, which I visited this summer. Part B in the trilogy (24.04.2004 – 24.07.2004) set out to examine which strategies and tactics artists and media practitioners utilise in order to create networks and collaborative projects. Deliberately stressing the military undertone of words such as »tactic« and »strategy«, the introductory text to the exhibition states:

[T]actics represent the tool used by the weak, whereas >strategy< is the tool used by the State, the strong entity. This partitioning, however, may be subject to change, and roles may be switched. According to De Certeau's distinction between tactics and strategy, strategy belongs to the State, to economic power, to rationality; it is based on a clear concept of boundary, a boundary separating the self from the other, and enabling a clear-cut definition of the enemy. Tactics prevail without separation and without boundaries; they need no frontal attack; and as they do not recognizes boundaries, they allow for migrating and diverging with the help of tricks and manipulations.
In other words, viewed within the larger Israeli political context, the State’s strategy of managing boundaries by resurrecting walls, closing checkpoints, detaining and imprisoning suspects is very much a case in point. The most extreme counter-example is of course the tactics employed by Palestinian suicide bombers, who show no respect for any geographic or corporeal boundaries by scattering their body parts and blood amongst those of their victims, and hence in a gruesome manner erode the distinction between self and other. The exhibition text continuous:
The works displayed at the exhibition offer a new agenda of artists struggling on behalf of social reform; artists who believe that art is not only a mirror of society, but that it can also play a role in social change. It is an art that functions in the age of technology, digitization, information; an art that coexists in dialogue with plagiarism, copying, imitation, duplication, manipulation, espionage, surveillance and immigration.

Whilst I am always wary of copy/pasting political strategies/tactics flatly onto the artistic realm, and conflating social or activist work with aesthetics - the latter usually either produces bad art or bad politics without doing justice to either the artistic or activist cause - I fully support the notion that art or any kind of creative practice can play a significant role within socio-political reform. The effect of art lies rather in its potential for offering a multitude of readings, and of defamiliarising the quotidian. This a subtlety traditional political activism usually lacks (out of necessity), since its goal is unilaterally predefined. What the curators of Hilchot Schenim B can be reproached for is that, owing to the sheer magnitude of the exhibition and the mass of tactical diversity, their main argument gets somewhat lost. When confronted with too many options, tactical manoeuvres become meaningless, and eventually acquire a shopping-mall sensibility. The work »How Much is Enough?« by Korean artists Meena Park and Sasa illustrates this aptly, and in effect makes an unintentional metaphorical gesture towards the exhibition as a whole. Strangely enough I was irritated by the piece, and regarded it as a stylistic red herring within the exhibition, since, in the strictest sense, it wasn’t media art. The artists addressed issues of consumption by displaying locally purchased products in a glass case, and investing them with 100% pure naturalness as symbols of excessive human longing. The act of collecting, categorising and labelling these products as serially 100% pure is in and by itself utterly meaningless. The exhibition as a whole – even though its individual works were of very high quality - was subjected to a similar risk because of the serial display and enumeration of possible artistic and critical strategies and tactics. This is particularly true when project documentation such as that of Krzysztof Wodiczko and artist groups Yomango, Ligna and the Bureau of Inverse Technology is shown. Documentation then serves solely an illustrative role as an exemplification of a theoretical argument.
My being familiar with about half of the works in the exhibition, and encountering them anew within an Israeli context, added interesting layers to the pieces. For example, viewing Jacqueline Salloum's ingenious videos »Planet of the Arabs« and »Arabs a-go-go«, which play off Hollywood’s Islamophobia by using stereotypic cut-ups from blockbuster movies and cartoons, in a country where institutional orientalism is part and parcel of everyday life has a really strong effect. In this respect, the curators were quite courageous in refusing to succumb to political correctness. Similarly, Chinese artist Zhou Hongxiang’s movie »The Red Flag Flies« deconstructs cinematic conventions by bombarding us with Chinese Maoist iconography and political mantras. The endless repetition of audio-visual and textual propaganda renders the message devoid of any content whatsoever. Experiencing this loss of meaning in one of the most highly mediatised parts of the world is particularly disturbing.

It has to be said that the physical spaces of the Digital Artlab are difficult: it is housed in a former school with three main buildings, so that one is almost forced to place the works separately into classrooms, augmenting the sense of the didactic. In addition, the physical boundaries between spaces decrease the possibility of viewing works in juxtaposition to one another and having them dialogue properly with one another. This was partly compensated by, for example, integrating originally single-channel works within a larger installation. The triptych dubbed »I Wandered Relentlessly«, consisting of Elyasaf Kowner’s video works »Haim«, »Triumvirate« and »The Snowway«, which I had seen previously as individual works at the artist’s studio, had a mesmerising power. Kowner scrutinises the politics of everyday life by being a participant observer who wanders through the local Israeli environment, and also captures himself as part of this environment.
The third and final Chapter of Hilchot Schenim is planned for early 2005, and investigates how cultural variation stemming from inter-cultural diffusion and processes of globalisation influences artistic production, and how artists working within these parameters imagine scenarios for the future.

More info: http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/index_en.htm

 

 

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