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SCALE TALE


2009













     When I was 19 years old, serving in the army in Israel, I was qualified for a special job -an aerial photo analyst. I was trained and given assignments to look for enemy activity and potential targets in photos; to find the story in the fuzzy stereoscopic images, to extract the relevance.

In the chain of events that lead to a bombing of a building (as an example) the decision making is first of all the analyst's. Once it is circled, that building is marked for doom, it is a green light, all systems head on. All members of the chain of command rank higher than the analyst. His destructive decision is a message forwarded up to generals and ordered back down to the pilot, to the targeting computer, to the bomb, till the confirmation of the onboard camera. There are hardly ever questions or doubts; it's all data.

When I watch precision bombing images on the news or on the internet I always get a twitch. I think it is because I have lived the 'back stage' of this sort of warfare. The images are used as positivist propaganda, to promote this sort of war as clean, smart, surgical, low collateral etc. It makes me wonder about the analyst: young, patriotic, with the genuine will to do a good job, to find the enemy, to circle that which later would be celebrated as a 'successful strike for our forces' on the evening news, propelled by the narrative of his society, he is making decisions of life and death, with total detachment.

The story in the head of the analyst is the story of his people brought to him by history media and actuality-media. Within this context he finds his narrative of identity which calls him to enact righteousness. We prefer to call these influences culture and history, or even heritage and knowledge, but in fact they come down to objects of media and networks of distributing it, books, schools, films...

History is the string that holds the timeline of justification, and educating about previous wars is an essential ingredient in this. Our industrialized history-making machines produce not only text books for schools but more 'attractive' media like the History Channel, Historic Blockbusters and war documentaries. Our historic picture is prescribed in film studios. It is in the studio that meaning is juxtaposed on images and events. Facts are linked with senses, and through the senses history is linked with the present, not only in narrative and rational but most essentially with feelings.

In Scale Tale I create a world where we can enter into the backstage of the industrialized history-machine. The scale models are reconstructions of locations destroyed in war by precision bombings. I analyzed the smart-bomb video (found on the internet), and rebuilt the location first with a virtual 3D computer program, and then finally from balsa wood.

In a historic scale - These locations will be forgotten in the whirlwind of history as it is hardly ever the case that locations of war-crimes get the prime time slot. But in the Scale Tale world the resurrected buildings are being prepared to be filmed against a blue-screen background. Their image is made ready to be juxtaposed, to attain a meaning, to be placed in history, to be featured in one of our tales as a decoration with an aura of the real.

Blue screen set for hollywood war film.