SFMOMA | Exhibitions | Julia Scher: Predictive Engineering2

New Work: Julia Scher's Predictive Engineering2



	October 23, 1998 - January 12, 1999 Julia Scher's most recent installation piece, Predictive Engineering2, is based on a previous installation featured in the 1993 exhibition Thresholds and Enclosures presented in SFMOMA's former location. Organized by SFMOMA curator of media arts Robert R. Riley, the current installation recreates the ambiance of image, audio, and spoken word narrative of the original interactive surveillance piece, but advances the artwork using sophisticated computer-controlled retrieval devices and on-site cameras to emphasize and further articulate the Museum building observed as a real-time surveillance event.

Video stills from Julia Scher's
Predictive Engineering 2
1998
(Courtesy of the artist)

		Scher works with video, computer software programs, display interface devices, and contemporary electronic surveillance equipment to establish a site for scrutiny within the Museum. The technology, Museum architecture, and activities of its inhabitants are each engaged in creating a media piece using the technological advancements of the information age. The conflation of these media with live and prerecorded video imagery, instructive voice commands, and graphic notations ultimately turns the instrument of surveillance on itself: Predictive Engineering2 invokes themes of danger implicit in the mechanisms and materials that the artist appropriates from the security industry.

	Video stills from Julia Scher's Predictive Engineering 2 1998 (Courtesy of the artist)

Scher's large-scale interactive installation--a panoptic design--represents in art the experiences of location, data collection, and social regulation in ways that provoke cognitive dissonance. The boundaries defined by the Museum's physical structure are deflated; they are dialectical to the transient, ephemeral quality of surveillance video that maps the site for virtual exploration. The artwork immerses the viewer in a voyeuristic, invasive, and analytical world of hardware, cameras, monitors, and automatic instruments. Established motifs of reward and punishment, the objective and subjective dimensions of desire, the seen and the unseen deliver a cautionary narrative of complacency produced by today's digital technology and telepresence.

Scher draws our attention to the design and operational protocol of communication technology by implicating the Museum as a site and as a social situation. She mixes the visitor within it by exposing through surveillance the subtle intrusions into personal freedom caused by the systems that are ostensibly designed for public safety.

This exhibition is part of the Museum's New Work series, which features recent or commissioned work by both younger and established artists. The New Work series is made possible by Collectors Forum, an auxiliary of SFMOMA.

Special thanks to Pioneer New Media Technology for equipment support and to Zuma Digital for production support.