Press Release X-Steps Removed Video installation, 3mins, 2009 K.Yoland X-Steps Removed sources one single image from the BBC website, which was reporting on the Gaza War during a 3 week armed conflict in the Gaza Strip and Southern Israel, December 2008 - January 2009. The original image is a photograph of two boys walking amidst the rubble of Gaza carrying a sagging object. One of the boys appears to be looking into the eyes of the camera and thus at the viewer. The surrounding rubble is the destruction of buildings and homes as a result of bombing. The photo depicts the aftermath of violence without being a ‘direct’ image of violence in action. It was important to the work that one of the figures looks at the viewer and one does not seem aware of the viewer. It is also important that the figures are children and both born into this conflict and considered casualties of war. Given that the original photograph was taken from the web, the video’s first image of the boys is already of degraded quality. Initially the video takes the web-image and changes it in one single step to high contrast. Subsequently, the image is altered with incremental steps until it disappears. No single image appears very different if compared to the previous or subsequent image, but step by step the image of the boys are effaced till they become abstract shapes and finally a grey square. The process of gradual changes slowly creates a ‘distance’ between subject and viewer. As the boys disappear, so does our understanding or grasp of their story. Although numbers reported vary (and are contested by the Israeli Army) it has been calculated (by those including Israeli human rights groups) that the conflict resulted in between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinian deaths and 13 Israeli deaths. A media-image from a conflict zone was chosen for three reasons. Firstly, the photograph pertains to document a long-term reality of tragic proportions, which is lived daily by a community, but which is not our own. Given that the average outsider has no first-hand understanding of enduring a long-term conflict, it might be asked whether the tragic-proportions only have status of ‘reality’ inside ‘documentation’. Does this mean it is in fact a sub-reality for those that never experience the events? If empathy could be measured for these conflicts would it be the same level as the empathy that someone feels watching a dramatic TV series? Secondly, although the conflict is ongoing, it is only documented at certain times for outsiders. This suggests that the conflict or tragedy varies in importance and relevance to outsiders. Thirdly, the nature of such a long conflict appears to be analysed and debated from the macro level (the political context) leaving the micro level (individuals and innocent casualties) under-discussed. X-Steps Removed explores what is an outsider’s relationship to human tragedy and conflict when it is through the receptacle of media accounts and documentation. The silent video flashes the changing images onto a black insert, intercut with a ten second count down. This aggressive video editing bombards the viewer with endless images and asks the viewer to question the consequential emotional effect or lack of it. Near the end of the video the images and numbers fall out of order and this plays with the notion of fresh and old news, fresh and old memories and fresh and old empathy: News that reaches the top of the headlines one day can become last-page-news a few days later. The aim of the video is to open up a public, social, academic or political discourse regarding the impact of human tragedy at a distance, human responsibility at a distance, the propensity to loose focus of individual casualties within a political conflict and the purpose and nature of present and future media outlets. For many people in the West, they have not got a first hand experience of war or mass-scale tragedy. Although information is regularly punctuating our lives from media sources, we are distant from the emotional realities they depict. The duration of our focus is often limited to a few seconds and is also processed through our memories of cinematic accounts of tragedy and war. However, with cinema it is acceptable to forget a fictitious tragedy as soon as the credits roll. Our relationship to real emotions, real suffering and real violence ends up being mediated in the same way as fictitious accounts, which allow us to digest the pain but not be weighed down by the suffering of others. Violent news is sliced in between sport, tv-series, celebrity-miscellaneous and advertising. Our lack of emotional empathy and understanding might be caused by the way the news is served to us. There is usually only a short window for impact before the next wave of distractions arrive.

• published: 11 Apr 2012
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