DEFECTIVE :: DEBUGGING MEDIA MYTHS 03.01.09

MASSIVE UPDATE!!!! SPACE RELOCATION::
DUE TO UNFORTUNATE EVENTS THE SCREENING HAS BEEN MOVED TO HEAVEN GALLERY!
THE PROGRAM WILL START @ 7:30 INSTEAD OF 7 TO ALLOW FOR LATE COMERS DUE TO SITE CHANGE!
HEAVEN IS LOCATED @ 1550 NORTH MILWAUKEE, 2nd FLOOR

Defective: DeBugging Media Myths

Video Screening + Live Video Performances Curated by Nicholas O’Brien

We are currently engrossed in a swamp of media myth. The myths are precisely those that follow Roland Barthes’ Mythologies in that we have come to understand our media and all its manifestations as being a natural part of our cultural economy. The methods in which these myths populate our minds and envelope our space is through virtual experiences. These interactions can happen through memory, technology, and “sculpted space.” Now however, we begin to see ruptures in our virtual interactions. These disturbances occur when our mythological expectations of media are left unfulfilled or torn apart. The fragility of these myths leaves them ripe for breaking. These fissures can be found in Morgan Higby-Flowers’ System_Painting1, where the fabric of his studio fractures into cascades of glitch. Mark Beasley and Aleksandra Domanovic take mythic media objects and distort our expectations by creating hypertexts of signs and symbols that reprogram the documents original content and context. Likewise, Nicholas O’Brien takes the cinematic spaces shared between blockbuster movies and nature documentaries and renders their landscapes as being somehow both epic and transient. Jon Satrom approaches these myths with a playful skepticism and makes us question the reliability and the absurd nature of our digital interactions and appliances. In Friendly Fire, Shane Mecklenburger creates a serene field of guns doing what they do best in video games: shoot. In doing so, he takes on a role of showing the bizarre pairing of beauty and violence in certain aspects of game culture. Defective approaches the breaching of myths in our virtual surroundings by exhibiting the necessity of play and feedback in our otherwise stagnant media interactions.