Tyler Coburn: Remote Viewer

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of works by Tyler Coburn. The exhibition is comprised of a single-channel digital animation, a text, and an object designed in collaboration with architects Bureau V.

In 1969, conceptual artist Douglas Huebler teased the limits of photography when he announced his impossible desire to “photographically document the existence of everyone alive.” In October of that same year, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Administration (APRANET) made its first host-to-host connection between labs at U.C.L.A. and Stanford University. Ten years earlier, with help from the U.S. Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency launched the CORONA project for the purpose of gathering Imagery Intelligence (IMINT) through photographic satellite reconnaissance.

Seen from our era of Big Data, machine learning, biometrics, and asymmetrical warfare, Huebler’s deadpan proclamation seems less quixotic than prognostic. After all, the ability to document the existence of every living person is far more plausible when the mechanisms of state and corporate surveillance are abetted by the intimacies of ‘selfie’ surveillance, in which unwitting users yield personal information through quotidian digital interfaces.

Eyes that traverse time zones through image feeds belong to bodies that can be geolocated through the very phones that host the feeds. Despite our attempts to transcend corporeality, we are ever more subject to both immaterial and material capture. Are we viewing remotely, or are we being remotely viewed? Who is transmitting, and who is receiving? And how might the histories of remote viewing, automatism, and psychic scientism inform how we’ve arrived at this moment?

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and teacher based in New York. He received a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University and an MFA in Art from the University of Southern California. He also served as a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program from 2014-2015. Coburn’s work has been presented at numerous venues including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich. Coburn is the author of two books: I’m that angel (2012) and Robots Building Robots (2013), published by CCA Glasgow. His texts have appeared in e-flux journal, Frieze, Dis, Mousse, ArtReview, LEAP, and Rhizome.