The Magnetic Card: an installation

 

The ones who own the magnetic card live in the First World. Those who live in the Third World do not own the consumer plastic card. They carry a magnetic card that invokes the computer and classifies the subject carrying the card only as an object. The revolutionary nature of the magnetic card in the First World, flips into one function of total control in the Third World. It denies subjectivity and relates to human beings as objects. Thus technological revolution in one social context becomes terror in another social context.

 

This work is composed partly of a photographic syntax of images appropriated in and around Gaza Check Point.

A metal reconstruction of the long meshed barrier which leads to the Check Point.

 

The entrance to the installation is low and narrow, the space is in total darkness, limited to one viewer. Entering the space activates 3 consecutive transparent screens, representing moving images captured at the checkpoint and projected in short intense intervals. Fragmented flashes of painterly and photographic intense atmosphere images. The viewer’s enclosed narrow space simulates the surroundings a Gaza worker has to encounter on route to work.

 

The surveillance/terror aspect of the installation represented by the magnetic card is depleted by transforming it into a rug --- a passive object carrying the image of a magnetic card, to be stepped on. However, by walking through the dark, narrow, enclosed space, where the only source of light are the projected images, and hearing noises of the checkpoint, with both images and sound activated by the viewer’s own movement in this space, the viewer will sense and recapture the memory of the other, via the flashes of representations of those who are stripped of identity by means of digital terror.

 

 

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