The work of Los Angeles-based artist Kerry Tribe underlines the potential for reconfiguration that emerges from the process of re-enactment, through an exploration of the mediating potential of time-based documentation. Working in live performance, sound, film installation, and video, Tribe examines the possibilities afforded by the material qualities of time-based recording media to re-enact a particular event. In doing so, the artist\u2019s works seek to complicate our perception of a past event in the present. Tribe\u2019s exploration connects the flexibility of material in indexical media documentation to the incongruous ways by which the human mind recollects. If indexical media, in its direct rapport with actual events, is normally thought of as having the capacity to document objectively, what we must contend with in Tribe\u2019s work is the idea that indexical recording induces an inevitable process of mediation, which causes glitches in representation at the moment of playback. Tribe\u2019s work is not concerned with producing accurate renderings of past events. Instead, the artist exploits the simultaneous loss and gain of information that occurs from the translation process inherent to documentary representation. Speaking to this effect, the artist notes: \u201cA lot of my work [tries] to capitalize on the failures of representation, particularly the failures of representation in indexical and time-based media.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Kerry Tribe, \u201cImage and Amnesia.\u201d Music and the Brain Symposium at Stanford University, Stanford, California, March 5, 2011, accessed March 28, 2013, http:\/\/vimeo.com\/21762753.<\/span> I would argue that, more than examining the failures of representation, what Tribe\u2019s work introduces is the idea that the accurate re-<\/em>presentation of a past event is impossible due to the flawed mechanisms of both human cognition and documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tribe\u2019s media installations investigate the shifting ground that memory procures for recollecting, reconstructing, and re-actualizing the past. In the catalogue of Tribe\u2019s recent exhibition Speak Memory<\/em>, presented at The Power Plant (Toronto) in the spring of 2012, Eli Horwatt writes: \u201cTribe has made a practice of inverting the essentializing character of the photographic image and its status as prosthetic memory machine, pointing to tricky intersections between mind and machine by interfacing the two in unexpected ways.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Eli Horwatt, \u201cSpeak, Memomy, Cinema,\u201d in Kerry Tribe: Speak Memory<\/em>, ed. Melanie O\u2019Brian (Toronto: The Power Plant, 2012), 42\u200a\u2013\u200a3.<\/span> Tribe\u2019s work positions the partiality of indexical media documentation as analogous to the partiality of human memory, and examines how the process of mediatized4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - I use the term \u201cmediatized\u201d in reference to Philip Auslander\u2019s analysis of mediatized performance\u200a\u2014\u200aperformance mediated through or integrating technological media\u200a\u2014\u200ain Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1999). The performative character of Tribe\u2019s video and film works renders them akin to mediatized performance as understood by Auslander.<\/span> re-enactment can transform present perceptions of the past. Instead of considering the partiality of mediatization as a deficiency of the medium, Tribe capitalizes on this infidel rendering to produce new readings of the past. The artist relies on the inherently flawed nature of memory, whether ethereal or material, to produce work that remodels the past by inflecting our perceptions of it in the present. Two of Tribes\u2019s works, the film installation H.M. <\/em>(2009) and the video There Will Be ________<\/em> (2012), provide insight into the different ways in which the artist aligns the flaws of human cognition with those of indexical media documentation in order to rework the past and construct new versions of it in the present. Exploiting two different techniques to re-enact events via technological media, these works respectively reveal the particular time-fold that occurs through re-enactment and its subsequent effects on our perception of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n H.M. <\/em>is a film installation based on the story of \u201cPatient H.M.,\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Henry Gustav Molaison (1926\u20132008), better know as \u201cPatient H.M.,\u201d became amnesic as an unintended side effect of the brain surgery he underwent in 1953 to cure his severe epilepsy. As a result, he became an important case study in the field of neuropsychology (he was studied for over fifty years), which enabled breakthroughs in neuroscientific research into human memory.<\/span> a man who lost the ability to retain memories after undergoing brain surgery. To alleviate his severe epilepsy, H.M. underwent a surgical procedure that removed his hippocampus\u200a\u2014\u200athe part of the brain that we now know is responsible for making lasting memories. The surgery was successful but caused the patient to become amnesiac; while H.M. could recall events that occurred before the surgery, post-operation, his short-term recollection became limited to a 20-second time span. H.M.\u2019s story provides fertile ground for Tribe to investigate the hazards of memory both conceptually and materially. Her eponymous installation consists of a double projection of a single loop of 16 mm film that re-enacts moments of H.M.\u2019s life by combining restaged scenes of his past, narrated accounts of his surgery, historical photographs, and shots of significant locations from H.M.\u2019s youth. Using the material of film as analogue to human short-term memory, Tribe\u2019s installation creates a destabilizing viewing experience whereby viewers\u2019 recollection abilities are tested through the delayed duplication of the projected film. Upon entering the installation, viewers come in contact with two adjacent film projectors through which passes a single loop of film. On the other side of the installation are two projections of the same film: the projected image on the right plays back the projected image on the left with a 20-second delay. This playback interval is caused by the space separating the two projectors, through which the film loop travels as it passes between the two projector reels. As a result, the 20-second time span that constitutes Patient H.M.\u2019s short-term recall is mimicked by Tribe\u2019s physical manipulation of the playback medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film is constructed as a pseudo-documentary of H.M.\u2019s life, and therefore can be said to constitute a partial re-enactment of it. This instance of re-production is doubled by the repetition mechanism that the installation sets in place.Repetition within the re-enactment creates a situation whereby the re-actualized original events re-actualize themselves anew in the process. Presented with multiple iterations of the same projected timeline, viewers face the limitations of their own mnemonic capacities. Since viewers come into contact with the displayed projection apparatus before they even see the projections, they know<\/em> that what they are presented with are two projections of the same film, albeit different moments of it. Yet the destabilizing effect remains: because many scenes seem to appear on the right channel for the first time, viewers may fail to remember the sequencing of the images, and new connections between the two projected channels are created. A back and forth in time operates between the left and the right projection channels, which complicates the narrative that unfolds in the film itself. Already re-creating a new version of H.M.\u2019s story, the film re-creates itself as it is being screened. The viewing experience that Tribe has created superimposes the past and the future of the film\u2019s timeline; the two channels become interchangeable and establish new relations between the elements that compose the film. Tribe opens the possibility for multiple narratives and concurrent readings of the same original story to emerge as she exploits the mechanics of film projection to trigger the re-enactment of the \u201coriginal\u201d re-enactment. Using the mechanics of both human cognition and film projection, Tribe successfully unhinges the fixity of the past as it is in the process of being re-presented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There Will be ________<\/em> relies not on the physical mechanics of indexical media to reconfigure past events, but rather on the internal set of relations that the history of film itself has fostered. The 30-minute HD video presents a set of sequences, each of which proposes a possible narrative for the unresolved murder(s) and\/or suicide(s) of Edward Doheny Jr. and Hugh Plunkett at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills in 1929. Playing with the uncertainty surrounding the original events themselves, Tribe\u2019s video re-enacts five suites of events that may have lead the oil tycoon and his assistant to their deaths. In the process, the artist references the history of the mansion itself, which leads her to incorporate fragments of collective memory, forged over the years by the cinema industry, into the work. In her re-staging of the possible events leading to the men\u2019s deaths, Tribe incorporates dialogue and shots from films that were made in the Greystone Mansion, which became a prime Hollywood filming location some years after the tragedy occurred. There Will Be ________\u2019s <\/em>dialogue is constructed solely of appropriated lines from movies that were shot on location, and Tribe films the mansion\u2019s interior in a manner that re-stages the sets of a number of scenes of popular Hollywood films.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Among them: Eraserhead<\/em> (1977), Indecent Proposal<\/em> (1993), The Big Lebowski<\/em> (1998), and There Will Be Blood<\/em> (2007).<\/span> The re-enactment here is therefore doubled since the video re-constitutes speculative versions of the deadly events of 1929, but also revisits the cinematic history that took place at the mansion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Multiple moments in Greystone Mansion\u2019s past are overlaid in Tribe\u2019s re-actualization of events that took place within its walls. There Will Be________<\/em> revisits not only Doheny\u2019s and Plunkett\u2019s deaths but also lines that were spoken in the mansion and shots that were captured of it. Tribe\u2019s blending of multiple instances of the past creates an impression of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. This impression is established both through the video\u2019s internal structure, which showcases multiple iterations of the same events, and through references to fictitious collective memory constructed by instances of cinematic representation. Tribe\u2019s video therefore skews viewers\u2019 perceptions of time as memories creep up on their present viewing experience. The internal logic of Tribe\u2019s video distorts the linear unfolding of time; past perceptions superimpose themselves on the present so as to re-produce the past. Events are enacted not again, but anew, as they become entangled in a set of new relations and meanings. By presenting no fixed conclusions to the re-staged murder(s)\/suicide(s) and, by the same token, re-enacting events from the repertoire of popular cinema, Tribe creates an open circuit of associations, suggesting that the actual past can only but be elided as we attempt to represent it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Tribe\u2019s mediatized re-enactments, we lose sense of the linear unfolding of time, of the constant movement of the present towards the future, which creates in its wake an ever-growing chronology of the past. Tribe\u2019s work engenders a perception of time that is not \u201clinear and fixed, but liquid, malleable,\u201d to quote a line from H.M.<\/em> Combining the \u201cflaws\u201d of both human memory and time-based documentation, Tribe\u2019s re-enactments produce new versions of the past more than they replicate events. We could say that the artist\u2019s mediatized re-enactments are akin to a m\u00f6bius loop:7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Not coincidentally, one of Tribe\u2019s film installations, Parnassius Mnemosyne<\/em> (2010), utilizes the m\u00f6bius loop as a formal device to loop a 40-second strip of 16 mm film. As a result, the two sides of the film are alternately projected and the image flipped.<\/span> they inflect a twist in the structure of past-tense re-presentation, making it become autopoietic.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/79_DO07_Bourcheix_Tribe_HM-3.jpg\")
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Photos\u2009: courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/79_DO07_Bourcheix_Tribe_There-will-be-________-2-scaled.jpg\")
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Photos\u2009: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/79_DO07_Bourcheix_Tribe_There-will-be-________-6.jpg\")
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