When I included Charlie Tweed’s video series, Notes I (2008), in an exhibition last year, it garnered a consistent kind of response: something along the lines of “It’s creepy...but I like it.” Certainly not the most elaborate of analyses, but it speaks to the immediacy and visceral nature of one’s encounter with Tweed’s work, an incongruous mix of familiarity, apprehension and appeasement.
The three videos that comprise his first series of Notes, entitled We are the above, Where we are now, and We must undo, consist of scraps of found digital footage. Described by the artist as “video transmissions”, they are paranoid dispatches sent from insidious, mysterious groups who enact a fanatical desire to regain control through the environment. They propagate extreme survival techniques, communicating a series of bizarre calls-to-arms such as “re-wilding”, becoming “uncivilized” and “tackling the problem of the birds”.
In We are the above, for instance, a digitized female voiceover drones a plan for mass flooding like some anonymous mechanical leader: “We are a collective of minds...we are building a new space high up on the margins” preparing for the inevitable “bringing of the water.” Scenes of people scaling towers, bridges, and the walls of indoor gyms are spliced with shots of men battling bears, caging birds and damming waterways, and of garden plots being watered and vehicles left abandoned in floods.
In fact we are watching amateur sports and communal play: camping, hunting, gardening, diving, climbing, bird watching and so on. Yet combined with glimpses of industrial sites and contextualized by buzzwords like ‘strategy’, ‘capture’, and ‘deploy,’ these innocuous images become haunting ones. Set to an ominous musical score evocative of a lead-up in a docu-drama or a moment of sci-fi meltdown, they take on connotations of sinister doings, like records of some terrorist training camp or a doom-laden world where political, military and ecological horrors unfold.
Tweed appropriates the vocabularies of various media forms, melding them together so that their individual characteristics are neutralized. Documentaries, instructional videos, propagandistic films, YouTube clips, surveillance records or amateur news footage - it becomes difficult to differentiate one from another. As context, time and place become uncertain, the boundaries of fact and fiction blur. Is this happening now or in some post-apocalyptic moment? Or can we assume that they are a premonition that will never be realized? To what extend are we being deceived?
In transforming contemporary material into atemporal Notes, Tweed manages to evoke occasions both real and imagined in which fragments of media technologies, consumer mantras, political and scientific discourses, and overarching collective neurosis react together to create a suspended state somewhere between inaction and action. With the repetitive calls to act now set in language full of inclusive commands (“we will...”, “we are...”, “we shall...”), Tweed harnesses a sense of urgency and brings us into the fold. In this circumstance tag-lines such as “The time has come to bring things to a state of inevitability and utmost probability” seem to make sense.
At the same time our familiarity with the textures of the digital media and their colloquial imagery breeds a sense of déjà-vu. Its cohesive presentation and hand-held aesthetic assure a certain continuity, foster confidence, and in turn naturalize the absurdity of each proposal. Like a lead up to an uncanny moment, or a foreshadowed encounter with the Real, it grounds the viewing experience in a cloak of reality just as it builds an atmosphere of anxiety. Even as suspicion moves us closer to the content, the messages appear vacuous, incongruous or just a little way off. The voice from above proclaims: “Soon the powers of the highest nature will be our shared ability” and “the water will prevail us”. Mispronunciations caused by the digital voiceover compound the confusion, in some instances rendering words unintelligible. So we are left with the shell of the message, devoid of meaning except the momentum of its intention.
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Of course, what is at stake is control. Within the space of a few minutes, Tweed demonstrates how irrationality and rationality can be fixed into some semblance of a meaningful message, how materials can be activated and transformed into platforms of ideological conditioning. The points hinge on the age-old question: is it external social, political and environmental conditions or individual human agency that carries the upper hand in determining our behaviour?
Apply this debate to the topic of the environmentalism and Tweed’s slight of hand becomes apparent. He presents a layered response to our present circumstances by drawing out the push and pull of familiar dichotomies: fate versus determination; engagement versus detachment - alienation of the individual or sublimation into a collective; the desire to sooth as much as to excite - to strategize according to the rational mind while attending to its emotional framework; to deconstruct and reconstruct until one act can no longer be distinguished from the other; and to prompt activity that in itself, demands a kind of passivity.
Tweed builds the self-consciousness of his audience into his line of questioning. Those given to attend art exhibitions and debate the points of pending ecological catastrophe, are likely well-versed in the insights of wide-reaching philosophies gleaned from burgeoning liberal arts educations - the sociological, political and psychological studies that intersect with newer disciplinary tracts such as media studies. Their meta-narratives are well ensconced in the complex spectrum of media output composed by generations responsible for its manufacture as much as for its consumption. We are, we believe, ‘on to it’; we know the games, the rules and can PowerPoint their pitfalls. We know that critical thought often depends on, or is in flux with, a fundamental desire to succumb to archetypal fears and their ideological offspring.
Yet while we are heavily invested in the idea of critical action we continue to rely on its reductive forms. We relax into the wave of trends, commit to hyper-activity and succumb to oversimplifications. We do not always walk away from our desire to absorb and be absorbed by messaging systems that suit our personal and social impulses. Despite our sophisticated rhetoric, we still answer the call of commanding drones, and we still invest in and perpetuate the same fears that we hope to overcome; but we do so with one eye a little open. We continue to destroy, protect, enjoy, revere and distrust our environments and ourselves. We are empowered. We are disempowered. We are uncertain. We are, in short, a scared and scary bunch.
Tweed’s videos present an appearance of control. They assert the presence of an author who offers clear directives. But the messages remain unresolved, the voice illusive and unaccountable, capable only of recasting existing anxiety. These are just notes after all, degraded scribbles that may or may not form part of a larger whole. But empowered by nuanced use of language and calculated application of various media technologies, they annotate the process of cultivating fear - of our environment, of our politics, of others and of ourselves. The resulting brand of panic produces nonsensical statements like, “We will achieve the emerged.” It’s the kind of paranoia that makes us “suspicious of the action of birds,” that prompts us to attempt to reverse the direction of their flight. It indulges our tendency to dabble in ideologies, actively maintaining a ‘critical’ distance while slouching into paralysis.
And it is here that Tweed inserts an appropriate spike of black humour, adding a snippet of his earlier work into We are the above. We catch a glimpse of his alter-ego Man From Below who campaigns for the creation of underground communities to protect us from pending ecological disasters. In a flash he appears sporting his signature hardhat and orange overalls, peering up like a mole from his tunnel. Having been offered a quick glimpse of the true mastermind behind the messaging, the author relinquishes control to the higher authority of the absurd.
In being enticed by creepiness and ingratiated by a subtle, self-referential humour, Tweed has implicated us all in the circle of information transmission and reception. Interrupting the heaviness with a statement as ephemeral as our consciousness, we are given permission to dabble in ideological action: “Eventually we will achieve the stop... but until then we must maintain the pause.”
