take1:
take2:
screen version:
For the remainder of this class I wanted to explore the possibilities in creating some sort of online performative visual experience. I wanted to see what could be done by harnessing the masses of content available on the web. I was initially interested in thinking about the internet as something that was “collapsing” time from a cultural perspective facilitated by its massive and cheap capacity to preserve and distribute media—
What was your first experience of going online? … What about Google image search? “I specifically remember my first image search. I searched for trees. Like, “green trees.” And it was really overwhelming because there were so many pictures of trees, all at once. Before, you could only look at books.” (src)
art history has been “flattened” for artists of a certain age. “When they typed in ‘tree’ ” in a search engine, … “they got a thousand pictures of a tree: a picture of a tree made in the 18th century, a tree made last year, a cartoon of a tree. You have this flattening of time.” (src)
But what if this isn’t actually the case? When we Google something or look at one of our many content feeds on various social or news platforms, it’s all about *now*:
Digital media is truly a time-based medium, which, given a screen’s refresh cycle and the dynamic flow of information in cyberspace, turns images, sounds, and text into discrete moments in time. These images are frozen for human eyes only.(src)
References:
Edward Shenk “Theorist” — Visual artist leveraging right-leaning conspiracy theorist type of content that he apparently finds often on facebook and can probably be recognized to be more or less prevalent on the web by most people. He breaks this style of image-making down to its formal qualities, revealing the sort of sinister underlying tone… “There’s this manic connection-making like in the darker parts of A Beautiful Mind. If something looks like something else then that is proof enough. There is no such thing as pure coincidence, and that’s a hallmark of paranoia.” (src)
XTAL fSCK video performance — The visuals these performers create exemplify the “default” visual effects inherent in the MacOS UI: mashing [ctrl+alt+cmd+8] to use the color-inversion accessibility feature to create a strobe effect, using Quicktime’s screen recording feature to create endless recursion, swiping between desktop spaces, opening and minimizing windows with genie-effect in slow-motion, emojis and iconography are all overlaid and mashed together ad nauseum. The way the MacOS UI is exposed in this formal performative context reveals and accentuates visual qualities that were hidden in plain sight, forcing the audience to realize age-old questions of artistic merit and technological control in a context that we find ourselves in every day but perhaps overlook.