For a Better World (review)

For a Better World presents to the viewer the suicides of five men and women, in which self-immolation was used as a means of bringing injustice and oppression to the attention of the population. Shocking images of these acts are countered with a woman's voice coolly analyzing the case-studies of a batch of unnamed perpetrators and descriptions of the acculturization of such practices in certain societies. Her emotionally unattached, BBC-type documentary voiceover weaves in and out with that of an emotionally charged American male, who berates the listener as we watch grainy video footage moments from an incandescent suicide. Indeed, the pointy finger that appears from time to time as the user patrols the picture area, seeking to switch voices and launch some more archive footage, is the only thing that "triggers an action," as the artist puts it. Eventually, two captions appear on the screen and offer a choice, also rhetorically: "New Begin" and "Continue."

We are then immersed in a series of circles, a virtual tube in which we rotate, confronted by drawings based on images related to the topic. We search for the next pointy finger, listening to the English voice calmly narrating the sociological viewpoint. We are able to move through a layer of charcoal (burnt wood) images and shift into a different "tube." The trigger action confronts us with the flat abstract space of a television news report, the station logos and time-code quantifying and owning the segment that, when ended, returns us to the charcoal wall to continue our searching.

These closed, claustrophobic spaces encourage a meditation upon the condition of self-sacrifice as an act of spectacle, worthy here only of remote analysis and comment. The individual sacrificial victims' motivations are somehow lost in between a principled "No comment" from the artist and the desperate grasping by the viewer to comprehend the causes for such desperate acts. It is as if Jan Palach was another possibly unbalanced performance artist rather than who he was, the student citizen of Prague enraged and helpless, as we all felt in 1968, when Russian tanks crushed the "Prague Spring." We are manipulated by our removed involvement to seek beyond the surface of the disc the histories, the circumstances that caused these people to kill themselves in such spectacular, media-grabbing style. For a Better World, however, presents us only with some visual and audio artifacts related to their actions.

While recognizing the right of the visual artist to restrict their terms of reference, there is an implied responsibility in this age of super-surplus information to provide access to the background of material displayed within an artwork. Hyperlinking and interface design enable users to make decisions for themselves about where to stop this process of investigation rather than have the initial researcher (the artist, in this case, but it might equally be a physicist or sociologist) advertise their concern, then leave the scene they have set. The statement Palach made before his death, for instance, is too obscure yet too important a document to be lost to the interacting subject in this way—interaction as an option does not imply resolution but can go further than ultimately nonproductive choices, which might encourage a cynical disregard. So you want to know more? Sure, perform an advanced find in a search engine—but realistically, who has the time to read the plethora of documents that would be delivered to the screen?

The artist, whether accepting responsibility or not, is an arbitrator, an editor of lived experience, as is so deftly demonstrated here—the need to "give voice" to these individuals' experiences goes further than simply advertising their demise by utilizing a representational form (archive footage and spoken text voiceover) in an ironic, but essentially unproblematic, way. These are symbols, but of what? The essays that accompany the CD-ROM do not go...