The shift away from grand globalizing themes, which characterized the earlier more prescriptive practice, had to do with a more immediately localized and focused perspective which was ready to embrace political alliances acrossrace and ethnicity. By the late Eighties I was beginning to arrive at a position of exploring issues based on my personal interests, with a view that whether these issues gel on a subjective level with individual members or the audience is a question out of my hands, and that it is also to a degree independent of their membership in any particular social, ethnic, racial or gender constituency' (cited in Mercer, 54).
xxiii. For a discussion of the Foucauldian basis of Piper's work, see Sean Cubitt, “Keith Piper: After Resistance, Beyond Destiny." Mercer's discussion of Piper's evolution also makes reference to Foucault's conception of the imbrication of power and resistance. For example, "What distinguishes Piper's use of digital multimedia is his reflexive approach to the questions of power and knowledge intrinsic to the use of such visual technologies in surveillance and policing strategies that seek social control over the burgeoning chaos of urban space" (15). Like Cubitt, Mercer suggests that Piper gradually comes up against the limits of Foucault's model of knowledge/power, but goes one step further in citing Piper's concern with the emotional problematic of residual identification (what I am calling affect) as a means to complexify and move beyond the Foucauldian impasse. See, especially, 58 ff.
xxiv. For an account of the role of (in)visibility in art history, see Michele Wallace, "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of thc Visual in Afro-American Culture." Specifically, Wallace invokes the “paradox of invisibility": “On the one hand, there is no black difference. On the other, the difference is so vast as to be unspeakable and indescribable"(43).
xxv. As Mercer puts it, Piper actively uses the loss of certainty “as an opportunity to expand one's awareness of how the past has positioned the self in relation to others," to effect a “reconciliation across generations" and a "return to the enigma of the unknown past as a political obstacle to social reconciliation in a racially structured society"(67).
xxvi. As if to literalize the universality of this implication, by zooming in on its target and framing it with the clicking noise of the camera aperture, the interface implicates the viewer (again no matter who it may be) in the unavoidable violence of classification.
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