It has to be remembered that three years earlier Allan Sekula had immortalised the nascent alternative globalization movement in Waiting for Tear Gas. As a private citizen (with no press card or accreditation) he photographed the major demonstration in Seattle against the globalisation of the economy from within the middle of the crowd.

Jules Spinatsch installed three computer-controlled cameras in a library and two residential buildings near the Congress Center where the summit was being held, to record the area from three different angles: on the one hand the Congress Center’s accesses and the procession of alternative globalization demonstrators which, having been held up by the Black Blocs, arrived too late in relation to the camera’s programming, and therefore remained invisible. He was not in the crowd, but at a distance, with his programmer, shielded from the public gaze and the two groups expected to be confronting one another (the demonstrators and the police). The 2176 individual photographs were transmitted from Davos to Zurich, where the single images were mounted to form a 20-metre long panoramic view, constituted over the five days of the summit, in the art space Walcheturm. As happened in Davos, one of the main qualities of Jules Spinatsch’ strategy is the contradiction between the programme’s schedule, and the actual course of the events that unfold in front of the automatic camera. This absurdity is also a quality of the work Heisenbergs Offside, which recorded the World Cup qualifying match between France and Switzerland in 2005, showing the entire Wankdorf stadium in Bern without ever showing the ball on the field.

Two thirds of the semiautomatic projects depict places associated with power, whether judicial as in Panopticon JVA (a Mannheim prison), financial as in Competing Agendas (the Frankfurt Stock Exchange) or political as in Fabre n’est pas venu (Toulouse City Council offices), or places associated with leisure, such as Heisenbergs Offside or Vienna MMIX 10008/7000 (Vienna Opera House) or the Tanzboden 1 (a rave party in Mannheim). This assumed equivalence between sites of power and entertainment venues is directly inscribed in the logic of our mercantile societies that subjugate humanity in all spheres of life and in which free time is no more free than working time.

It should be emphasized that the artist develops this dialectic with a technique of control of people which is part of ultra-capitalism. Thus Jules Spinatsch opens a new chapter in the “documentary style” 1. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Michael Hagner speaks of a “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit” (evenly suspended attention) 2, a concept of Sigmund Freud’s that has its equivalent in Walker Evans’s “documentary style”: the least artistic way of documenting the tangible world, as developed by the keynote photographer of the modern world (and the 20th century), i.e. a neutral style, equivalent to a hardware catalogue, as Edward Steichen once described it with more than a hint of contempt.

During recent years Jules Spinatsch has become increasingly interested in the independent qualities of single images: in particular the absence of intention in automated creation. On the one hand it leads to a new relationship between the author and his material, but it also impacts on the audience’s expectations of authorship. He treats the single images as an archive which leads to a variety of final forms, something he explored to the full extent in the Vienna work: a circular panorama installation, blocks of rearranged single images, then a two-volume book, that combines these two approaches. Finally for this exhibition he presents a video sequence of the recording at the time, one image every three seconds, in real time. The Centre de la photographie Genève is staging a first comprehensive exhibition of Spinatsch’s semiautomatic photography projects. The exhibition is roughly structured into four parts: The entry hall introduces the raw material – single images from various projects, presented as posters, detached from their original context. On the right-hand side, the ground floor is entirely occupied by the artist’s inaugural works from Temporary Discomfort, Chapter IV, including the installation as shown and acquired by MoMA (N.Y.) in 2006. Soft valley, a panoramic recording again from Davos 2003 and never previously released, is also
shown.

The left-hand side concentrates mainly on his latest projects: Inside SAP and Panopticon JVA, recordings at the headquarters of the multinational software corporation SAP and at a panoptical prison, both located in or near Mannheim. As a quintessence, they provide their own visual analysis, embedded in a functional analogy between the software and the prison industry. The first floor displays a wide range of projects from 2005 to 2012, in a variety of final forms: framed panoramas, a unique spiral-shaped panorama Vienna MMIX – Cul de sac, an unseen view of a controversial Geneva urban structure in Snowdon Habitat. The installation relating to the history of nuclear technology, Asynchron I-III, and a new series, Sous la table – Fabre extracted from Fabre n’est pas venu, a panorama of Toulouse City Council, should also be mentioned.

Next to the exit of the CPG, the artist takes visitors into a photographic reconstruction of his own studio. After covering events and places of power and entertainment in public and semi-public spaces, the artist invites us into his private sphere.