The Dystopia Files

The Dystopia Files is an archive of video clips depicting conflicts between police and protesters since 1999. Shot by police, activists, and independent observers, the footage documents an escalating domestic struggle between radical resistance and state power.

Dystopia Files Installation at the DeCordova Biennial

DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA

January 23 - April 11 2010

For this exhibition, I projected excerpts of the archive onto a glass gallery door. When the door is opened, the projection disappears and the gallery lights turn on. The projection remains off as long the gallery is occupied. When the gallery is empty and the door is closed, the lights turn off and the video comes back on again. As a result, the video can only be seen from outside the gallery, where the video appears backwards and only a narrow vertical slice of the frame is visible.

Other than the projector, the gallery contains only a set of locked file cabinets. The drawers of these cabinets are labeled with the names of activist groups, ranging from the relatively familiar (ACT UP, Food Not Bombs) to the obscure (Center for Tactical Magic, Shadowy Revolutionary Cell).

Taken as a whole, the installation functions as an apparatus that alternately reveals and conceals the contents of the archive. Its operations mirror the tactical selectivity with which police and protesters release their own video documentation of their interactions. The installations simple interactivity replays on a formal/experiential level the dialectic of surveillance and spectacle that characterizes contemporary cultures of security.

Stills from Projected Video

Artscope Magazine

"Among the threads [in the Biennial] is a concern with archival practices that runs through not only [Ward] Shelley's cardboard mountain but also Mark Tribe's ingenious installation 'The Dystopia Files.' Tribe, who teaches at Brown University, has transformed the DeCordova's photography study space into a simulated surveillance archive. From outside the unlit room, viewers witness video footage of conflicts between police and protesters rear-projected onto its closed frosted glass door. Before reading the curator's description, they hesitate to enter. In fact, I saw a man reprimand his daughter for trying. And this hesitation generates an aura of trespass around the work, one heightened by a motion-activated control system inside that unexpectedly stops the footage and turns on the lights.

"The room's interior betrays 44 locked flat files (actually the DeCordova's photo collection), which Tribe has relabeled with the names of political art collectives and activist groups, giving viewers the sense of having infiltrated the secret archive of a hegemonic, Orwellian regime. Perhaps obviously, the installation comments on the revival of COINTELPRO-like federal surveillance practices in the U.S. following 9/11 and the Patriot Act. If you stand still long enough, however, more provocative interpretations emerge: the room darkens and the footage resumes (now mirrored in front projection) as you switch roles from threatened intruder to comfortable insider. Tribe gives you the opportunity to play both surveyor and surveyed, hinting at how the gap between the security culture of the state and its critics closes when the latter adopt what he calls 'a defensive posture that mirrors the logic of the forces they seek to resist.'"

- Mark Drummond Davis, "A Dense Web: The 2010 DeCordova Biennial." Artscope Magazine, Vo.l 5, No. 1.

Special Thanks to:

Helena Anrather, Glassbead Collective,  Larry Hildes, Sarah Kay, Joshua Kopin, Brandon Neubauer, Nikita, Shruti Parekh, Sarah Sharp, Time's Up Video Collective.

Funding for The Dystopia Files was provided by the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds program, which is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.