Operator(Refinanced II), 2017–ongoing, HD video, color, sound, drawing and wall, 14 minutes, 48 seconds, at 80WSE, New York. Produced by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York.
Operator(Refinanced II), 2017–ongoing, HD video, color, sound, drawing and wall, 14 minutes, 48 seconds, at 80WSE, New York. Produced by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York.
Operator, 2017–ongoing, HD video, color, sound, and wall, 14 minutes, 48 seconds, at 80WSE, New York. Produced by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Photo: Joerg Lohse.
Patricia L. Boyd develops work through an investigation into the infrastructure of its own production and presentation. Boyd’s Operator (2017–ongoing) was shot using a custom-built system of motorized camera rigs, designed to repeatedly scan the floor of a black box theater from different heights through a series of vertical and lateral tracking movements. Although this type of equipment would usually be used to facilitate spectacular effects within the illusionistic framework of a narrative film, Operator instead functions as an interrogation of the soundstage as a site of production. Boyd has digitally added crosshairs to the center of the frame and in combination with the mechanized, programmatic quality of the camera movements, this calls to mind associations ranging from machine-aided manufacturing systems through to surveillance cameras and drones.
Boyd re-edits the film, which was originally commissioned in 2014, for each presentation. Its duration is determined according to a calculation based on a loan repayment scheme that Boyd devised. She imagines that the fees she receives for the project are loans that must be paid back with interest, with each of the film’s sections constituting a “payment.” Equating duration with monetary value, Boyd makes the length of the work a financial measurement that reflects the economic relationship between artist and institution. Operator uses both mechanical systems and architectural space as metaphors for the state of subjective interiority under the pressure of neoliberalism. The matrix of cameras as a stand-in for the network of competing agents: self-regulatory and self-surveilling, endlessly moving in the pursuit of a product.
