Jules Spinatsch – Control and Failure. Jules Spinatsch’s Temporary Discomfort and Surveillance Panorama Projects

In this sense, TD is a quest about the conditions under which photography can be produced to cover such events, which are normally sealed off from both the general public (as we are all potential protesters) and the press (as some of the meetings will have never taken place, officially). He starts off by using a range of different tools, from the classic photojournalistic 35 mm to long telescopic lenses, medium format cameras, and video.

The fourth attempt, TD IV Pulver Gut, Davos, however, goes one step further: Together with a webcam engineer, he installed a surveillance triangle with three cameras, covering almost seamlessly the entire environment of the World Economic Forum. TD IV is also the starting point for a new body of works, the Surveillance Panorama Projects. 

I would argue that there are three main aspects to Temporary Discomfort and the Surveillance Panorama Projects: The first is surveillance as a form of political control, of an unequal power relation that has to be maintained by means of an apparatus, which includes observation and security. Closely linked to the WEF, Spinatsch appropriates some of these mechanisms, and "subversively turns their technology against themselves", as he has put it. This apparatus then becomes a second, methodological aspect in itself, as it can be employed on a larger scale, not only in the context of the promoters vs. adversaries of globalization. These works thus stand in a historical tradition of what I once called "Unmanned Photography", e.g. pigeon photographers, rocket cameras, satellite images, webcams, and drones. The tradition is nearly as old as photography itself and has produced remote-controlled and autonomous photography devices, most of them used for military purposes.

In his most poignant works, Spinatsch uses a programmed camera system to capture a certain area in columns from left to right, following a precise grid over the entire duration of the event. The single images are then assembled in chronological order to form one large panorama. The resulting images are a contradicting liaison of control and failure. Two competing agendas – the schedule of the event versus the programming of the camera – construct a new narrative and trigger speculation about time, image and reality, as the image plain is split into unintended time fragments. 

Just like in Borges’ story of the cartographers, this machine-managed and objectified reality is so close to reality that it becomes useless. The best example for this might be Heisenberg’s Offside, which was done during the World Championship Qualification game of Switzerland against France. He produced 3,003 still shots from an interactive network camera, during the whole game, but not a single one shows the ball. "A complete failure, as for the representation of the event, isn’t it?", says Spinatsch. It only shows the structure, the framework of the event, you can see each and every spectator, but the essence of the game is lost.

The third aspect of these works would be the presentation, which takes place in spectacular installations in a public space, in a more conservative museum-type hanging, and in book form. No.4 Vienna MMIX, in many ways the chef d’oeuvre of the series, can serve as an illustrative model: During the 2009 edition of the Opera Ball, Spinatsch placed cameras all over the building, taking automatized images for eight hours, from the opening of the doors until the end of the ball at five in the morning. This way he managed to get two full panoramas, of 720 degrees, in some 10,000 images. When looking at them closely, he uncovered the power of individual images: "The overall structure is very precisely programmed; thus, the space is represented exactly twice. But what is happening within the frame is unintended. This contradiction to control the space but not the action is the core of the work". After the presentation of the circular panorama in the public space, and blocks of individual images in the art context, he used the book form to give the work a third life: "It is the best end form for this work. It works perfectly". The first volume contains all the images; it is like a flipbook of the process: 10,008 images in chronological order, on 568 pages, with each double page showing 36 pictures from different camera positions, representing two minutes of the event. For the second volume, he selected 71 individual images, which should stand for the whole event. The third volume features a text by David Campany and another one by neurophysiologist Wolf Singer. 

The Opernball piece, in this sense, unites all the important questions and methods of the whole series, a methodology that Spinatsch developed in TD IV, and which he maintained, with iterative adjustments, until his latest work, Inside SAP, which goes one step further.

Text | Moritz Neumüller

IMAGES CAPTIONS

1 | Discontinuous Panorama B251356, Anti–World Economic Forum Demonstration, Davos, Switzerland, 2013. 1740 single images recorded from 13:56–17:15. Camera B: Hertistrasse, Talstrasse, Congress-Center South Entry, Kurpark
2 | Discontinuous Panorama C240700, World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2003. 817 single images recorded from 07:00–08:30. Camera C: Promenade, Congress-Center North Entry, Davos Valley
3 | Discontinuous Panorama A240635, World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2003. 2176 single images recorded from 06:35–09:30. Camera A: Promenade, Congress-Center North and Middle Entry
4 | Discontinuous Panorama A281818, After World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2003. 2176 single images recorded from 18:18–21:13. Camera A: Promenade, Congress-Center North and Middle Entry, Kurpark
© Jules Spinatsch / courtesy of Christophe Guye Galerie