[Nettime-bold] new video on gender and geography

[geobodies <geobodies@smile.ch>]

appologies for cross posting - please circulate

for immediate release


REMOTE SENSING
A videographic topography of the global sex trade
in the age of geographic information systems

Ursula Biemann © 2001, 53 min. digital video, English


Remote Sensing traces the routes and reasons of women who travel across the
globe for work in the sex industry. Voluntarily or not, women are displaced
in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, from
Bulgaria to Europe: female bodies in the flow of global capitalism.
Spiralling down from an orbital view captured by image satellites, the
video-essay takes an earthly perspective on cross-border circuits,
trafficking routes and illicit economies. The highly digital documents
generated for this video connect new geographic technologies to the
sexualization and displacement of women on a global scale. Using the latest
images from NASA satellites, the video investigates the consequences of the
U.S. military presence in South East Asia as well as the European migration
politics.

Remote Sensing visualises the multi-layered meaning of geography where the
sexualization of women in global capitalism is linked to the implementation
of new technologies in often contradicting ways. While the Internet
facilitates the migration flow, particularly for women via bride market,
the border reinforcement technologies, on the other hand, hinder and push
it into the illegal sector. The European visa politics are quite explicit
in their practice to channel migrant women directly into the sex industry.
The assemblage of documents reveal how technologies of marginalization
affect women, and particularly economically disadvantaged women, in their
sexuality and how powerful players like States, scientific complexes and
military institutions, install a sexuality that eroticizes hierarchies.

Female bodies are the new cargo in the highly lucrative transactions across
boundaries. Of course there are numerous structural and political reasons
that lead women to move, or to being moved, into the gigantic Fordism of
service of the global sex industry. But there is no simple moral
distinction to be made between trafficked women and those who choose this
venue of survival. The video explores the large grey zone of negotiation
women engage in and the different concepts of prostitution they adhere to.
Remote Sensing aspires to displacing and re-signifying the feminine within
sexual difference and cultural representation, where sexuality is often
presented within the narrow confines of a masculine symbolic.

Satellite visions of globality are producing a sexual economy in which it
has become thinkable to reorganise women geographically on a global sca.e
The use of imagery generated by geographic information systems (GIS) opens
a fundamental critique of Western thinking. Satellite images propose an
abstract and highly accurate view of the world from the top down. The
evaluation and interpretation of the millions of geospacial data collected
by the satellites currently in the orbit are based on binary computer
languages. Through this lens, the world may seem graspable, controllable
and easy to categorise. Yet capitalism creates social as well as material
landscapes which are only comprehensible in their complex interrelation.
Remote Sensing fills in missing geographic data which offer a gendered and
relational view on the global flows of humans.

Ursula Biemann is an artist and videomaker focusing on gender
and globalisation issues in economy, media and the urban space.
Zurich, Switzerland
geobodies@smile.ch
www.geobodies.org (soon on the web)



_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold