Images Taken Not for Their Images

This project is part of my practice of resisting aspects of visual culture and deconstructing images that is partly indebted to 1960s conceptual text-based artists, letterism, and Situationists, but also correlated to orthodox attitudes towards the image. It examines restrictions that Israel places upon Palestinian telecommunications in the West Bank, such as the locations of radio masts placed within Israel, the height Palestinian networks are permitted to build their masts, and that illegal Israeli settlers living illegally inside Palestine enjoy 3/4G coverage while Palestinians receive 2G. These technological infringements inhibit the movements for everyone in the West Bank and Gaza where civilians can be more easily and cheaply monitored and arrested, which is reflected in the Israeli arrests of Palestinians for a range of alleged offences on Facebook or Twitter, particularly incitement. These restrictions affect the way we receive and disseminate information, which was felt as a tourist/gentile/interloper visiting Palestine for the first time, unsure how to respond to the paranoia of being monitored or being in the wrong place. The project was made during a period of forced abstinence of Facebook and Twitter due to the paranoia of working between Lebanon and Israel, and so is a manual version of Facebook’s pin-dropped album where the geographical data and time-stamp has been pulled via a simple desktop application from each JPEG’s file. The response I hope reflects an overwhelming urge not to overly rely on visual representation, and to instead state as minimally as possible what the work is and to simply provide the raw data of the image.

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