As explained in the previous post I am presenting only a part of the whole project which still doesn’t have a name, but certainly identified its objectives. I am documenting the vast network of air transport around the globe, a project that will take a significant amount of time since access has been limited so far, only as a traveler, and it is highly unlikely it will increase due to strict regulations. This doesn’t mean though I will not attempt to gain access through standard procedures. To this end, I am hoping that exhibiting this project could create an opportunity to approach the spaces of interest.
Two years ago, when I began photographing Ground Support Equipment, I did not have this in mind, and it only occur to me that air transportation is basically a network. Landing points are nodes of the network, that have many similarities with the internet protocols. An airport is an intelligent building that makes several operations by utilising several other sub-networks. An internet router works using the technique of storing and forwarding information. My previous background in electronics and telecommunications has been mixed with principles of documentary photography, and sociopolitical interest.
Soon after I graduate, I am planing to publish a book acting as introductory point.. Every published body of work will be a chapter of the greater project on the invisible or mundane/ordinary networks that we have been built around the planet. I am not expecting to keep a visual coherency throughout the chapters of the project, because each one is unique and looks at the same subject from different angles, so it needs to be presented and the most complementing way possible, either this is print or electronic media.
The body of work I am exhibiting at the Lanchester Gallery, Coventry 30th May – 5th June 2014 (digital exhibition at the img19.org website) is going to take the form of prints, since the visual aesthetics of the set, define this as the most suitable way to present in a white wall gallery.
This is body of work is still situated within a variation of social documentary discipline. In a conventional sense, social documentary has always been a documentation of disadvantaged people, as in war, poverty, natural disasters etc. On the contrary, I am interpreting the term as being the traces of human activity and the impact on society by giant power structures and networks. Primarily this project is exploring authority, social control, either state or corporate, and communication as an integral part of human evolution within social structures.
I am currently pulling in the research a broad selection of literature spanning from politics, philosophy, history, media and communications theories, systems and network theories as well as sociology.
I have been looking the works of political scientist Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and The Last Man), texts from Guy Debord (Society of The Spectacle), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), Antonio Negri (Empire) Paul Virilio (War and Cinema, The Information Bomb), media theory from Marshall McLuhan and Jürgen Habermas, science fiction writings from William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick. As well as many net criticism and cyber space texts. At the moment the material are very broad, but that will not be an issue once I start make connections between them.
Joseph Kesisoglou 