An example of when media recalims art

Don’t ask me how I remembered the Rolling Stone cover, but as I was researching topics and materials for Columbia class on Tuesday, I was immediately struck by this popular reclamation of Cindy Sherman’s early-ish photo work.

Sherman’s piece from 1981, Rolling Stone cover 1999.

Facetime Mail

As seen on the Blue Line CTA going downtown this morning. New Advertising campaign from dentyne ice employing facetime media vernacular.

Another attempt at talking about my work

After taping a nice lecture last night of Alison Bechdel – diary based graphic novelist and “cartoonist” – I started to think about my own work; clearly not as an illustrator or writer, but as a media practitioner and enthusiast. Combined with the lecture, and teaching class yesterday – a mild and speedy attempt to cover 3000 years of media history – I thought of rethinking some statements I’ve made, and how to discuss on-going threads or oppositional strands in my work. This all, of course, is fairly masturbatory, but perhaps also essential for young artists like myself to undertake, especially when there is not a clear unifying theme or topic that defines me as a person (i.e. race, gender, sexuality; for which i have no unique qualities).

So with all the apologies out of the way, here I go (again) ::

My work, a conglomeration of media based art ranging from super8 film to specifically web based projects, shifts between poles; authenticity and ego, selfhood and community, myth and memory, immediacy and slowness, etc. Clearly these poles or binaries, are conventions that typically plague art by means of needing classification and compartmentalization. These oppositions mark my work due to my insistence that when stretching these poles to their maximum on each side of their unifying spectrum you actually bring them closer together than separate. This play, this reverse gravity or magnetism, shapes a large fence around my pasture of artistic production. It allows me to simultaneously create work that can be both ideologically dense and casually precise with formal or aesthetic simplicity. This practice often allows for an undermining of both approaches to creativity.

In valuing play, and encouraging subversions of myself and the weight of art history, my work leaves much room for audience interpretation and investigation. In this way, my work can be viewed as being demanding; asking viewers to make judgments and assessments for themselves. My father put it well in Pulcera(2007), a 27 min documentary about memory and its (de)construction: “Without having to give answers, you ask the right questions, and that in itself is a tribute to the medium in which you work.” Although this film clearly had many questions – and perhaps in some ways created clever solutions to those for me personally – I now find myself reaching further into the margins by not needing to ask questions to begin with. Instead, as is the case with The Natural(2008), I wish to regulate the subject material in such a way as to render the information output as relatively narrow, while still working with these poles in which I speak of (in this case between fantasy Hollywood blockbusters and nature documentaries).

I image future projects to involve more discrete play in which medium itself plays a more heavy role, exploring the polarity between amateur and professional, or quality of image versus quality of meaning. In this way, I intend my work to be more quick, easier to digest, and to utilize a growing common visual language to confront issues of serious play, and methodical relentless sketching.

While in the darkness

Last night, as I was trying to go to sleep, there were moments of many strange things occurring at once. I have a small fan in my room – which i recently moved to rest on the corner of a box of unpacked posters, although I’ve been living in my house for nearly half a year already. This fan, leaning against the cardboard seems to create a frequency of vibrations that made me at once feel in tune with the earth’s melody. The spinning of the fan blade seemed to be in unison with the breathing of the planet, or else just the rumblings of my house. At any rate, the sound was penetrating, and i felt as though my bed was shaking beneath me in time with the movements of the earth. At a moment of some kind of clarity, I started to hear a woman crying. Clearly a hallucination, but unmistakable in my head. She did not weep loud, or even very regularly, but instead she sounded as if she had been weeping for a long time, almost exhausted by her own relentless fit of tears. It was breathy, inconsistent, and pitiful, only in the sense that in hearing her i at once was overwhelmed with empathy. I knew it was astral projection. Then i tried to preoccupy my thoughts, tried to think about the projects I wanted to do, the chores I had to do in the morning, and the glowing colors of my svengoolie shirt. Even with my eyes open, the whirlwind of the fan and earth and the crying of my nighttime ghost seemed as lucid as the half-secure bare light bulb hanging gingerly from my ceiling. Then Jes called; an unexpected occurrence, since not only do i rarely talk to her, but she had somehow gotten my number and called me to get Tamas’. The only way that I would imagine her finding my number was from Tamas; but i remembered that he had switched his phone recently, so the logic seemed to match. She had said that Sarah had not been picking up her phone, and that she needed to urgently get in touch with her. Still unsure if I was hallucinating, i went through my phone book and retrieved Tamas’ new number in the hopes that she might be able to reach Sarah about her matters of concern. Then texts, and bridges came. Like vikings, or pilgrims (which, if history has taught us much, are ostensibly the same thing). These men, these figures in the dark, sang opera’s or hymn’s to their brothers, carrying coins to pay the gatemen, or else to have some copper to keep their hands busy. They might’ve wanted to place their taxes on my eyelids, in order to encourage me to sleep, but i heard the crying again, this time mixed with a hint of pleasure, shifting between extacy and agony. I had though of the other side of my empty bed, almost in a confessional manner, brought the pillow closer to me, and tried to start counting sheep. They too seemed to sing and cry, grieve and rejoice. The woman started talking now, in whispers of lust, with twists of shame and glory. I stood up in bed. Went downstairs to have a cigarette and console myself for the bitter-sweet nightmares I was having half-awake. Afterwards, I slept on the futon downstairs.

Video Sketch 2

Moments around Chicago, mostly in Pilsen after Golden Age 1 year celebration. More on that later.

Pandora’s EULA signup

in some ways perhaps I should commend Pandora.com for being so open about it’s marketing purposes, on the other hand perhaps this blatant transparency is a bit too smug or otherwise hubris for my tastes.

So Proud…

Hacked together the set up below when Mac mini-VGA adapters weren’t compatible with flatscreen TV. Improvisation is the mother of invention.

Set up for Displaying Laptop->TV @ Marwen orientation

Dentist Magic

As seen here ::

Creative Problem Creating @ Gene Siskel Center

Last night I went to a screening that’s part of the weekly Conversations at the Edge series organized by the FVNM department at SAIC called “Creative Problem Creation” curated by Chicago artist and educator Jon Satrom. The screening ran a wide gamut – or “painted a broad stroke” as Jon put it – across the landscape of glitch aesthetic driven media art. The screening comes at a moment in Chicago when glitch/noise/experimental media art has come more to the foreground of contemporary media art works, and it was appropriate that there were many Chicago based individuals represented in the screening.

Don’t mind my chuckles, or Ben Syverson’s camera snapping.

Glitch is not easy to swallow. Not only is it mostly abrasive and disrupting, it also is traditionally unpredictable, and conventionally uncontrollable. The screening was not only well done, but the presentation itself was both eloquent and faithful to the medium. Jon’s hand was evident in the orchestration of how the work should both be received and digested. With intermittent interruptions in between tapes (like “problem with image” title slides with corny mid-50s elevator music, or suggesting that a work was on the other side of a laser disk) the screenings flow was seamless (perhaps paradoxically), making pieces almost bleed into one another. My personal favorite happened between JODI’s “MyDesktop OSX10.4.9″ and Archangel Constantini’s “Atari Noise” where Jon made it seem as though JODI’s piece was opening a quicktime file to play Constantini’s piece.

The apparent confusion and displacement that these transitions made left me at once giddy but also feeling as though I was participating in an inside joke. Although many in the audience seemed to be sharing in the puns, I did have a moment of wondering if this subtlety was being picked up on by others. Regardless, the creativity in this method of screening work, making not only dialogs occurring in tandem or consecutively, but also almost physically manifesting a linkage between pieces made for a wonderful system of ties, sometimes looping, sometimes folding into itself. This is particularly emphasized since some of the pieces shown aren’t traditionally considered “Art” by museum/gallery standards; the “Max Headroom Incident” (a video pirate broadcast that occurred on WTTW in 1987) and “The Web Site is Down” (by now, an almost infamous web video about an IT disaster) are primary examples.

Wish I could’ve gotten more of this, but i was just in awe.

Other highlights included Morgan Higby-Flowers (who needs a good website), a recently relocated Chicago based artist and his “Panasonic AG-77″ video and Brody Condon’s “Suicide Solution.” Morgan’s piece, a crazy intense, amazingly well paced and composed video->audio feedback experiment, is probably one of the most amazing pieces of contemporary experimental video that I know of. It’s hard for me not to champion his stylistically intricate work, and his great ability to understand and navigate movement and momentum through time. This piece in particular builds its tension from our expectations that even though the system seems in some ways controlled, the whole thing could become one huge collision of light and sound at any moment, and eventually Morgan delivers with an exploding cacophony of distortion and wails.

Brody’s piece on the other hand posits itself on a different type of tension that develops over time. “Suicide Solution” travels through a diverse array of game engines -mostly online death match type first/third person shooters – committing the act of intentional suicide. The piece initially is hilarious, traversing many frag grenades, cliff divings, and missile-to-wall encounters. After about 5 minuets of this, I went through a process of desensitization; still thinking that it was sorta-kinda funny, but not having the initial velocity of humor that the piece originally had. Then after a longer stretch of time, I become disgusted and horrified. Our suicide vigilante seems to epically fail on such a disturbing pace, with seemingly candid vigor for self-annihilation. I becomes almost unwatchable in its length and prolonging inevitability. Ever time Brody (or his avatar) respawn’s we wish the pain would be over before it even started. The best parts of this piece for me however are the more “cinematic” machinima moments where Brody takes a glimpse around his well rendered surroundings before taking the plunge.

Needless to say, the screening was powerful; as the saying goes, one could “cut through the tension” caused by the overload of sight and sound. Evidence to this is the fact that Jon received no questions at the end of the screening, a customary invitation that happens at every CATE event when the curator or artists is present. I’d imagine this happened because either people were too shocked to digest their thoughts to put together sentences to ask Jon, or because of the over-all intensity of the screening seemed to speak for itself.

Seat Lock

For Tamas

I knew these things existed, but this is the first that I had seen in action. I wonder how expensive these things get. I bet the are severely over-priced. I suppose its a handy alternative to having to get a quick release for your seat shaft though.