Peleg Dishon: Video installation

Location: Be’eri, Israel

Portrait of Media Artist

“My works are the result of an ongoing engagement with the phenomenon of the plasticity of information, the role of material and the essence of the artist's actions in the age of softwares.” - Peleg Dishon

Peleg Dishon is a very busy man. He moves from one complicated art instillation to another in in farflung places. I first met him when I traveled with the photographer Shlomo Serry from Jerusalem to Kibbutz Be’eri. We passed Sderot and other towns where rockets sometimes fall sent from the not too distant Gaza Strip. The landscape was dry, dusty, and not overbuilt like so much of Israel I was recently traveled through. Kibbutz Be’eri reminded me ofa cross between an old fashioned resort and a summer camp in the Catskills. Hoopoes, the Israeli national bird, wandered the well-kept lawns; flowers filled old wheelbarrows; people sat in chairs on long narrow verandas; and the dining room was right out of The Parent Trap.

Peleg Dishon had housed his art installation “This Is Not a Computer” in one of the small wood-frame buildings. We entered the darkened room through a black curtain which swung back in place keeping out, for the most part, the bright Israeli sunlight. The large space, well really two large spaces, held a series of machines which projected images on high, white walls. The installation is the story of the machines, the people in the kibbutz, and the kibbutz itself. It is also Peleg’s story and his family’s story because his father had managed the kibbutz for five years.

Peleg told me the storyof the machines this way: His installation of microfiche machines tells the story of Peleg Dishon’s family and kibbutz Be’eri. It is the story also of the Kibbutz’s industry, its factory whose purpose was to create microfilm and video machines. In 1980s these machines were brought to Kibbutz Be’eri before computers, but just as people mastered the techniques of the microfilm machines and began to use them, computers arrived and wiped out the need for microfilm. Peleg decided to find another world for these machines. He loves the machines and believes they can be emotional. His story is a reverse of the usual science fiction tale. According to Peleg, science fiction is about human beings need to be more effective and efficient . In the case of his story, it is the opposite. The machines have lost their world, a world in which they were supported and nurtured by people, so they have become people with names and emotions.

One of the machines, Hillel, is the first son. He brought the factory to the kibbutz. He liked the place so much, but he needed to convince the people that they wanted to keep the machines. He is the dreamer and also the engineer. He is the individual in what is really a collective enterprise, the kibbutz. Another machine, Gideon, is the son of the factory. He was built to be the strongest one and hold all of the knowledge and take the kibbutz into the future, but he is infertile and has no sons. He was born to a dead world and needs to have another world, so Peleg is trying to provide him with one. The third machine, Shlomo, is the guardian. He has taken the factory from beginning to end. He doesn’t have the emotions of the other machines. Even if the factory is closed, he is still the watchdog. Shlomo is loyal, but he won’t change anything. He is there to do jobs like answering the phone. His surroundings are what is left of the machines’ world. Several cameras make up the machine that is Shlomo. This combination machine takes microfilm and puts it into digital image. It actually works against all the others in the factory. It looks like a bizarre spaceship from the eighties with its three cameras and millions of cables. It is not Apple or even Microsoft, so who will want it/him?

Watch the video below to hear Peleg tell this story in his own voice.

More information about Peleg:

“Peleg Dishon was born in 1979 in Israel. In 2009, Dishon graduated with honors from the Hamidrasha - School of Art, Beit Berl Collage, He specializes in New Media and his unique work process encloses the entire history of the photographic and projected image – a history scanned therein, literally, in the speed of light, with its constituting mechanisms laid bare. As though marching backwards, his works process the digital, post-cinematic image by applying pre-cinematic means such as animated paper-cuts, shadow play and silhouettes. Dishon’s work, by its references to art history, popular art, the history of photography and cinema, popular science and science fiction, present new perceptions of time and space, and display a world of hitherto unknown and unexpected imagery.”

Peleg’s Artist Statement

New Media, my specialty during my studies at HaMidrasha art school, is the foundation on which my photographic outlook stands. The digital environment aims to compress as much information as possible into as little material as possible. It is interesting to note that in the digital age material and information replace each other's traditional values. Material, a disk, is hard while information is subject to constant manipulation. Similarly the plastic possibilities inherent in the processing of digital information break the indexical foundation of photography while hiding the mechanic mechanism of cause and effect, all of this to a point where it has lost all meaning. My works are the result of an ongoing engagement with the phenomenon of the plasticity of information, the role of material and the essence of the artist's actions in the age of softwares.