-force tracking: project description-
From curator Lisa Corrin:
As part of Reflections on a Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art has invited Jesse Aron Green, the Arthur Levitt, Jr. ’52 Artist-in-Residence, to create a work for its historic rotunda. Built in 1846 as the college’s first library — a centralized system for the ordering and distribution of knowledge — the rotunda is today the symbolic center of the museum, around which visual material and its history circulate.
The octagonal rotunda has an architectural parallel in the panopticon: an eighteenth-century, European prison system, in which prisoners are arranged in cells radiating around a centrally located warden who exerts control through the the possibility of constant surveillance. Power is achieved through the ability to see, be seen, or remain unseen.
Green’s installation, likewise, examines how a strategic ordering of space exerts control over our movements both physically and visually. Whether in his references to the meticulously planned galleries of a museum, in the dynamic composition of Assyrian reliefs that depict a king’s violent victory over his enemies, or in the precisely mapped arena of modern day warfare, Green’s work suggests how visual systems order our lives.
As we move around the rotunda encountering the barriers, passages, and reflections of Green’s installation, we enact the meaning of its title. Force Tracking refers to the U.S. military technology used to track both friendly and enemy forces. This GPS-enabled system is described as a "situational awareness capability." Pushed and pulled by the objects and references in the rotunda, we are asked to tactically navigate its spaces, to consider our position within them, and to heighten our own situational awareness of the forces acting upon us.
