reviews blackboxing
BlackBoxing
Blackboxing, 2007 (installation view).
courtesy Project arts centre, Dublin
Project arts centre, Dublin
2 novem ber – 1 December
The term ‘blackbox’ refers to an element within a system whose function Garrett Phelan’s Interruption. Or between two ITs (2007) falls flat:
is assumed but whose components are irrelevant or not understood: straining to detect signals in the void, the microphone returns nothing but
something that is effective but not visible. A consequence of this is that the its own inflated discharge, the scale of which cannot provoke a very ordinary
more successfully something operates, the more opaque it becomes. In leap of faith. Foil to protoreligious yearnings in the presence of the oh-so-
examining the mix of curiosity, fantasy and risk assessment that surrounds big and far away, Mick Wilson’s simple Allalooya: Nusrat and I (2007) offers
these secret agents, Blackboxing tests out a general model for making the faux-incantatory crooning for the mobile art viewer. Without ceremony,
invisible visible and for investigating the superior operational capacity of the portable gallery guide becomes a source of desublimatory gymnastics,
the opaque. suggesting that the allusive power of illegitimate use and confusion can
Economies of confidentiality and security are the theme of Peter reveal more than techniques of direct exposure. This is the case with L
Galison and Robb Moss’s forthcoming documentary, Secrecy. In its brevity Budd et al.’s whilst attempting to engineer a telepathic device (2002–7),
and ambivalence, the trailer shown here provides a generous rubric to the which sets up five ‘speaking’ suitcases to engage in ‘anomalous information
works that follow, especially the lengthy What Everybody Knows (2006), transfer’. At an unpredictable interface – part seance, part Wunderkammer
by Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, a documentary exposé of the use of – one awaits the emergence of phantasms from shadowy devices, unable
blackboxing strategies to aid Israel’s architecture of control in Palestine. to shake the anxiety that oneself might be an outcome of the telepathic
However, the demands of naturalism here overshadow the staging of dreams of others. Lastly, Grace Weir’s Endlessness (for Roger) (2007) pays
its truth-effects. Not so with Mariana Castillo Deball’s film Blackboxing homage to the aperiodic tile developed by Roger Penrose in the early
(2007), wherein borderline adventures of escape artists, war magicians, 1970s. The transparency of Weir’s demonstration adds little intrigue to
cipher writers and others demonstrate the complication of those who the pattern’s interminable puzzle other than retroactively as an instance of
disclose with those who ‘hide and survive’. The last of four films on show portraiture. But the surface of this pattern also participates in technologies
is Bea McMahon’s Aether (2007), an attempt to unravel mathematics for of enchantment at the core of any trade in obscurities. Greater obliquity in
dummies that fails to overcome its rather clumsy didacticism and literal- presentation might oblige one to follow the full extension of the pattern’s
mindedness. operations, rather than simply be seized by it. Tim Stott
artreview 128
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