The complexity of working in a “life sized’ scale has been challenging and very time consuming for me. Despite the completion of “ Machines of Understanding” (which you have see in older posts) I made the decision to shift gears recently and focus on a few smaller projects.
I spend a lot of time looking at objects, considering their form and relevance. I look for evidence of their functions, traces of wear and tear, and any other indications of why that object may exist. This is probably normal for a visual artist, but I often wonder how many people do this. It is something that I find enormously valuable and fun, and yet when I examine the cultures that overlap and form our society, I find very little evidence of what I would consider to be material awareness.
Moving from an industrial to a service culture has undoubtedly been responsible, in part, for this and I think it is likely that we will continue to see the effects of these consequences ripple throughout our lifetimes. The consumerism born out of this shift in our social and economic lifestyle discourages our knowledge of materials and pacifies us with cheap, available replacements for anything that falls out of the realm of perfect. Our media culture also keeps us distracted by moving much faster than what, I believe, is needed to truly digest information and make relevant decisions.
With all of this, it is hard for me to consider how anyone can both stay plugged in to our society and still maintain a relative grip on their consciousness, let alone take time to notice the subtleties of the objects we are surrounded by all the time. They just do not seem to be compatible to me.
Here is a piece that acts as viewing scope of sorts. It holds a magnifying lens that, in conjunction with a concealed light source, reveals the physical details of its contents.
This is my way of intentionally creating an atmosphere and a devise that shows the complexity and beauty of the simple things we seem to take for granted.
Here is a video not all that dissimilar to the Power of 10 by Charles and Ray Eames. It takes you on a time-compressed trip out to the edge of measured space and then back again.
I have often dreamed that I would be able to do this one-day either with some technology that was secretly bestowed to me by a rogue alien scientist or by becoming the apprentice of an omnipotent “Q-like” being.
Either way, this video is pretty great and I recommend turning the volume down and playing Black Sabbath’s Who Are You while you watch.
Over the years I have grown apart from my interests in Hip Hop. This, no doubt, is because of the direction the genre has been pushed in over the last decade. Nevertheless, I trudged through my adolescence listening, and being shaped by what I consider to be the golden age of Hip Hop and feel certain loyalties to it still.
Those days are gone unfortunately and have been replaced, as most things are in our culture, by a poorly simulated version of itself designed to mimic the stereotypes related to the cultural origins of the music for profit and other dubious reasons.
Despite that, Immortal technique has somehow held the line that Chuck D , KRS-1 and many others drew in the sand back in the mid 80ies.
Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.
This is my final project for a digital video class. I have become very interested in the potential for what can be “built in the video” through the editing process. With that, I have been re-thinking the approach I take when I design and build kinetic sculpture.
With video, a lot can be visually implied – converting many hrs of physical labor into a new ways of communicating the piece.
