Technology

Ouroboros: Music of the Spheres is Chapter 3 of Mysterium Cosmographicum.

"Positing a linear continuum, with 'nothing' at one end of the spectrum and 'something' at the other, at what point does 'nothing' become 'something?'"

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.

Director Jonathan Reiss and cinematographer/editor Leslie Asako Gladsjo traveled to Europe with Survival Research Laboratories to produce this entertaining and challenging portrait of the innovative group of artist technicians. The tape shows their machines in action and provides insight to their inspirations, political objectives, and budgetary constraints. The tape also reveals SRL’s efforts to confound and confront their foreign audiences with an artform that is, perhaps, uniquely American.

Slip is from Martine Syms’ Kita’s World series. Kita enacts the performances of everyday life in a hyper-digitized world. The character’s roles range from meditation guru to cultural commentator, and she speaks directly to questions of consciousness within the systems of labor, race, technology, and institutional failure. To the cognitive dissonance of Siri mishearing her speech, to the terror of (mis)representation, to the instinct to reconnect with nature.

A post-apocalyptic computer animated vision of humanity lost in an industrial wasteland, Maxwell's Demon was animated on a low-cost, consumer computer model - an IBM PC. The tape takes its title from an early 20th-century physics theory postulating the existence of an impossible intelligence, a being that knew the exact location, energy, and direction of every particle in the entire universe - something akin to your home computer, but a lot bigger."

“Hey, how’s that TV work?” 

Part of paraconsistent sequence series.

Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.

Sunstone tracks Fresnel lenses from their site of production to their exhibition in a museum of lighthouses and navigational devices. It also examines the diverse social contexts in which optics are implicated, contrasting the system of triangular trade that followed the first European arrivals in the ‘New World’ with the political potential seen in Op art in post-revolutionary Cuba.

Found-footage video about the destruction of the environment by man-made forces. 

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Hatsune Miku is a co-creation platform, personified by a cute and oddly seductive animated character. Fans bring her to life by creating content that she “delivers”. Her entire persona: lyrics, music and animation – is fan created, and that's her charm. Cosplaying Hatsune Miku, Ann Oren goes to Tokyo for a performative journey among these fans and explores the Miku phenomenon as an expression of collective fantasy. The habits of Miku's fans is a familiar exaggeration of our social media habits, that flood us with crowd creativity.

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.

"i am very grateful that my 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) series has shown internationally over the last couple years and is recognized by viewers, reviewers, critics, and curators as doing decolonizing work as a feminist project that queers and glitches the Western genre. 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) questions the quintessentially American Western in the forms of experimental films and games that are made from glitches and noise, pushing boundaries of legibility and tipping over threshold states of stability.

What do a luxury automobile, a cymbal, and a wall clock all have in common? What are the diverse attachments and experiences produced by those who make these things and those who consume them? What exchanges take place through the object itself—sensually, esthetically, abstractly? We often forget that most of the things we use are made by the labor of others, often in distant places, living dramatically different, diverse lives. What do these objects mean to them? How does their labor, their aspirations, their sense of alienation or satisfaction connect to ours?

Over The Horizon is a moving image installation that takes its name from the failed radar system developed on Orford Ness in Suffolk during the Cold War. The building that housed it and its aerial field are now used to broadcast the BBC World Service to Europe. Over The Horizon revisits the site where my earlier film Cobra Mist was made and explores through photography and sound the memory of a place, the remnants of history and evidence of stories true or rumoured.

Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity.

In this hour-long video, Dan Sandin demonstrates and explains in detail on modules of the Sandin Image Processor. Beginning with a playful and amateurish set up segment, Dan introduces his new invention, which he hints will be duplicated by Phil Morton shortly. 

Colonial Transfer vindicates the eidetic chasm that produced the arrival of television in the cinema as well as the absorption, transduction and digital expansion of television and historical film archives, all linked by the negentropic outburst of a source code in trance. This is the state of ever-expanding media landscape in the post-covid quarantine. Our state of space-time.

Our Non-Understanding of Everything is a series of 16 videos that explore how the structures of architecture, semiconductors, and circuits become forms of expression reflecting hierarchies, cognitive processes, and relationships to the natural environment.

Sunstone tracks Fresnel lenses from their site of production to their exhibition in a museum of lighthouses and navigational devices. It also examines the diverse social contexts in which optics are implicated, contrasting the system of triangular trade that followed the first European arrivals in the ‘New World’ with the political potential seen in Op art in post-revolutionary Cuba.

This video examines the iconic World Wide Web branding of the global marketplace, which creates disconnection and contrasts with the labor system in society.

In a city post-apocalypse, young men communicate only through smart devices. They make home out of urban debris. They can’t speak to each other, but are still able to dream.

The second video of the installation Touch Parade, which as a whole explores “plastic love” or fetish culture and the assimilation of marginalized sexuality on the internet. In questioning what is an explicit and/or illicit image, fetishes found on YouTube that consist of banal gestures, are re-performed. Unlike other pornographic content, these videos evade censoring because they are not culturally recognized as representations of sexuality.

The sale of a plot of land marks the kickoff of an unlikely road trip in this strange American odyssey. When eteam buys an acre of the Southwestern desert on eBay, the deed fails to arrive and the pair attempt to track down the phantom seller. Children in tow, the artists embark on a noir-inspired search through Colorado, Arizona and the American West to locate the shadowy landowner and claim their portion of the vast desert.