12.11.24 — There Are Limits
Remember when America was on the verge of civil war? Unfortunately, Donald J. Trump won the election, so no one will ever know, but fighting in the street rages on.
You could call it a revolution in video. Only this time the marching, charging feet, boy, belong almost entirely to the police. Right on the way in, at Bitforms through January 11, a small screen barely contains the damage. And that screen is only a trailer for an exploration of the medium to come.
Then again, that may be why things are out of control: police themselves are breaking the law. They are the ones setting the fires and striking the blows. Something like it, I could argue, has happened on actual city streets. Had law enforcement done its job rather than raged at peaceful protests in favor of Black Lives Matter, maybe there would have been fewer lootings and more justice. And still, Marco Brambilla knows, there are limits to control.
Already the short video had me afraid. It is not just the cuts back and forth between police geared for action and strangely quiet streets. It is also the cuts to a silhouette in fiery colors—of a man launching by hand a flare or grenade. In this context, the title screen looks more disturbing than the ocean in sunlight might otherwise suggest. Its ripples and crests are disturbance enough themselves, like a fire about to spread. Given the video loop, I hesitate to call it a beginning or an end.
The main event takes place behind a black curtain, on a doubly wide screen. Side by side, its two channels both reinforce and disrupt the video collage. This is Limit of Control, in the singular, but the efforts at control continue to multiply, and so do their limits. 
Not all of it takes place all that obviously on TV, although the talking heads include (repeatedly) Bill Clinton. Not all of it is made for TV either, although it has its costume drama. All of it, though, is found footage.
Brambilla relied on AI to collect the clips, although I might call it searching the Web. And that, too, leads to limits of control. Ever wonder what would have happened had the past unfolded in a 24/7 news cycle? Would the United States still have turned Jews away at the start of World War II? But then are mass killings any less likely today? Artists look less and less like masters of the created universe themselves.
Limit of Control has its own limits. It comes in a flawed tradition of new media as theater, going back to Bill Viola. (The older artist happens to have a new video on the Lower East Side, too, at James Cohan through December 21. People enter in Viola’s characteristic slow motion, just in time to be swept away by titanic waters.) What exactly is Brambilla saying? Is he questioning a world filtered through TV or celebrating it? Or could theater, too, be a metaphor for inhuman control and perpetual war?