Remote Viewing by Charlotte G. Chin Greene

Remote Viewing is an installation with CNC-fabricated, cast, found, and electronic objects that present the virtual as material. Image-making—from cave painting to satellite technology, from the pulse of an electron along a copper wire to the appearance of a digital image on an LCD screen—is a history of recursive modes of seeing mediated by tools. This is not to except non-human forms of biomimicry. Rather, it is to address a scale of vision, without eyes as we know them, which sees and shapes the world. I study how recursivity relates to the perception of space and time, and its effects in the realms of planetary-scale computation, cosmotechnics, global industry and labor. 
 
Objects in this installation made from found and recycled high-impact ABS plastic, often used in car manufacturing, are connected in a remote viewing system. “Remote viewing” is a term for remotely accessing cameras on networked devices through the internet. It is also a pseudoscientific belief that a person can see or perceive objects located elsewhere. For a person experiencing dementia, the latter is not out of the realm of possibility. 
 
This work is about witnessing my grandmother in her final stages of dementia, during the first year of COVID-19, primarily through video calls. A parallactic experience. Grief magnified through the starkness of Zoom and the vastness of the ongoing global pandemic, as well as racial and socioeconomic pandemics afflicting Philadelphia. Broken auto parts I saw while cycling (my sole method of transportation) came to signify a grief carried through not only my reality, but also the enormously complex circulation of material both viral and industrial. The act of picking up pieces of ABS plastic, manufactured in China, Taiwan and scattered along Diamond Street, Master Street, Aramingo Avenue, is simultaneously greater than, less than and equal to the sum of total actions that constitute this situation. To imagine such an act as the origin point of an iterative process of making limits my work to a linear scope, a human narrative, a single author, a final product. And anyways, an origin is just a coordinate reference that must be assigned. 
 
I am gleaning—giving care to—remnants of memory, and imagining a circumstance by which they break from a repetitive loop and recurse, drawing a long gesture through their evolving forms, bearing witness to the motion in which we are altogether situated, and one day all together again. 
 
In loving memory of 梅秀娴 (Sau Han Moy Yee) (March 19, 1927, Shanghai – January 28, 2021, New York City). 

About Charlotte G. Chin Greene 

Charlotte G. Chin Greene received their MFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art & Architecture in 2021. Their research- and process-based practice studies time, machines, modes of sensing and perceiving, and the global flow of material. From new media sculpture to site-specific installations, Greene’s work is achieved through utilizing digital fabrication tools and the practice of gleaning. Solo and two-person presentations of their work include Tack and Hide, Wick Gallery, Brooklyn; Red Work, Miranda Kuo Gallery, New York; Lamerica, Bible Gallery, New York; Anxiety Sex, Disclaimer Gallery, Brooklyn; in ATMworld, Chinatown Soup, New York. Their works have shown in group exhibitions including Ghost in the Ghost at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York and writing about their work can be found in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Bedford + Bowery. They are a 2021 Recipient of the Temple University Project Completion Grant.