Technology

In part a remake of Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! (1979), in part a repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology; The Well of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean.

-- Evan Meaney

This piece purports to be about the discontinuation of the much-loved format, Kodachrome, and with it the further endangerment of super-8 film. But it has other agendas of reclamation and personal reckoning that are its true subject matter. We begin with a short, experimental s-8 film make in 1986, which makes rather prophetic assertions about the future of artistic expression and the dangers of bodily intimacy. From there we jump to 2005 and to digital video.

Too Many Things visits the world of objects--their accumulation and dispersal--and their creation of cummunities of curiosity.  The title is somewhat ironic.  My work has always fed on things as the symbolic and incidental expressions of human presence.  For a photographer, or a filmmaker, there can never be too many things; the camera likes to ferret them out and hang onto them, just as some people do.  "Piled-up structures of inference and implication," as Clifford Geertz described ethnography's places of study, have also been my sites of activity as an artist

As the expansiveness of video and its accompanying new technologies continues to transform our culture and our world, another historical tension is developing—not unlike the technological revolution seen at the last turn of the century. That tension is felt, analyzed, and articulated in all of these recent experimental videos—a tension oscillating between the expansive promise of global communications that inspire new freedoms and social patterns on one hand, and the use of new media forms to simply reinforce existing hierarchies and capitalistic power structures on the other.

Earthglow is a poem written for the character generator and switcher that conveys a writer's internal dialogue through both subtle and dramatic color changes and through movement, size, and placement of words. The ambient soundtrack evokes the confleunce of past and present perceptions.

This video highlights several narratives concerning video surveillance—not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials and society’s insatiable voyeurism. A variety of subjects recount their interactions with surveillance—getting caught in the act of stealing or watching pornography, being discouraged from making an illegal ATM withdrawal—and question technological determinism, asking whether we choose to develop technology or technology shapes our choices.

If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. A plot of land is purchased in the online network of SecondLife and a simple questions is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them? To find out eteam set aside a year to let this virtual land use problem unfold and what is captured in Prim Limit is the lived experience of avatars managing and recording this dumpster.