Technology

County Down is a cross-platform, episodic, digital video, exploring an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community, coinciding with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. A rave-culture period-piece that harnesses the unwarranted optimism of the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically sews the seeds of its own destruction. Tracking the genesis of our current political climate, the ensemble cast banks on cultural appropriation and a constant din of micro-aggressions.

Computer graphics and RT/1 programming by Dan Sandin 
Original music and audio effects by Laurie Spiegel 
Algorithms & ray-tracer by John Hart
Mathematical research by Lou Kauffman
Visual leadership by Tom DeFanti

Flesh meets robotics in this early video documentation of Survival Research Laboratory’s spectacular exhibitions of collective invention, anti-corporate technology, and satirical mass destruction. In the performances documented here, various animal corpses are integrated into the action as the clawed and spiked machines attack dummies, each other, and, occasionally, the audience. The video begins with the song Stairwell to Hell, an appropriate prologue.

This is the vision from the “chinampas", the hectic life in the floating gardens, an ancestral system of audiovisual planting.

This tape includes footage of one of the first broadcasts of Lanesville TV, as it appears on the television set of Lanesville local, Todd Benjamin, and a television set installed in a public bar. Interwoven with shots recording the program’s reception, are segments recorded for Lanesville TV itself: Bart (playing the part of “Russell”) approaches Parry, dressed as a hillbilly car mechanic “fixing” the VW Van; nearby, Nancy opens the door to a cabin, wearing a bonnet, while Carol and Chuck, crowding behind her, play the part of other Lanesville TV protagonists.

Two bizarrely costumed characters – a human ‘chicken’ in a fat suit, and an elaborate folksy creature called an ‘authenticity fetish’- meet and debate their plight. In an attempt to reconcile themselves with some unspecified trauma of mass biotechnoviolation, these two beings quiz one another in rhyme and animation on the origins and ontologies of their species. A sardonic meditation on the nefarious reality of intensive farming, Artificial Intelligence, and the perils of denying complexity.

An intense conversation between two people one evening leads to a pictorial love story about loss and longing. An homage to Eric Rohmer and the attention he paid to the tiny details of everyday life. An eternal story of love and separation.

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.

The first twelve minutes features Phil keying his own image over his left eye (right on the screen), where he smokes and performs various facial gestures. The audio begins with background static noise, but part way through, it changes to a puzzling sound effect that he explains later.

A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person. 

Constituting an Outside (Utopian Plagiarism) is part one of Zach Blas's Contra-Internet Inversion Practice series. Contra-Internet Inversion Practice confronts the transformation of the internet into an instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism.

Dream Nightmare 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.

“Mining an ironic vein by turning technology against itself, AlienNATION undercuts the sociological ramifications of modern living. It is an astounding compendium of sci-fi images, textbook diagrams, special effects, and studio props, which together build multiple readings of the alien, the mysterious, and the obscure in American culture.

Archives recovers the formal community that mobilizes the diagrammatic experience of archives, a formal community that claims the sensory nucleus where hypertrophic rhythms, abstract machines, monuments and memorials, digital servers, corporate architecture, traffic and computer flows, light brutalisms, digital gadgets, detention camps, prisons and hospitals, institutes and academies, universities and housing all integrated in the rhythmic and diagrammatic outburst of the archives.

Skip Blumberg of the Videofreex conducts an interview with Charles “Cappy” Pinderhughes, the Lieutenant of Information of the New Haven branch of the Black Panther Party. From the steps of the New Haven headquarters, Cappy publicizes the upcoming Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention set to take place in Washington, D.C. later that week (June 19th, 1970). In addition, Cappy provides a statement to be shared via the Videofreex at the Alternative Media Conference occurring at Godard College in Vermont.

Two characters speak urgently to camera about their relationship with an intelligent substance they call ‘Animal Expanded’. The man has swallowed it, as he expands it impregnates his home, improving his family. He holds his five-year-old up to camera: “Look how her fibers are formatting - she is her very own accelerated portfolio!” The woman has refused – "it’s not alive in the right way". For this disobedience she is punished with Confusion Events. But in her studio she is building new weapons, bizarre kinetic sculptures that she believes will "Re-align the narrative centre".

This tape was produced by Artists TV Network, documenting a symposium that included composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, writer Richard Kostelanetz, and video artist Nam June Paik with art critic Dore Ashton serving as moderator. This freewheeling symposium taped before a live audience ranges from individual reminiscences to discussion of then-current art community concerns about music, literature, theater, art, dance, video, and technology.

The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.

 “Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.” 

-- Harun Farocki

Phil Morton starts the conversation by discussing an engineering project at the University of Wisconsin which was developing an early video communication system over satellite. Phil predicts the use of live-transmission of audiovisual elements for jamming purposes; his visionary thought resembles Marshall McLuhan’s prediction about the internet and social media. With the availability of a home terminal that transmits signals in real-time, the “system becomes a radical educational learning experience.” 

Imagining future Deep Time, Post-extinction, using dark humor to speculate on the defiant vitality of matter to evolve life again. Two billion years from now, the oceans are beyond understanding. A soup of plastics, cloth and string, song and dance, collaborate to find new ways of moving in bleak time. The ghost of an oyster holds memories of what happened. It sings to a scrap of waste that fell to the bottom of the sea, trying to form new life, trying to get a face. With help from Stevie Wonder, undersea karaoke may still be possible.

Animated Contingencies is an animated documentary that looks at how sketches take the place of photography in courtroom settings. Andrews focuses on how two different representations, a photograph and a courtroom sketch, capture the moment Moses Wright, Emmett Till's uncle, pointed out Till's murders while on the witness stand at their trial. The work then examines the authority of photographic evidence and how animated representations can provide both visibility and anonymity in testimony and other contexts.

Modeling Paranodal Space is part three of Zach Blas's Contra-Internet Inversion Practice series. Contra-Internet Inversion Practice confronts the transformation of the internet into an instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism. Invoking a practice of utopian plagiarism, Contra-Internet Inversion Practice experiments with queer and feminist methods to speculate on internet futures and network alternatives.

A buoyant character struggles with hazards in a cloudy gray environment in this animation inspired by the Dylan Thomas poem Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed. The look of the entire animation is shades of gray.

Fragments of Motion Capture data from two dancers were used to drive physical simulations of cloth, smoke, particles and fluids along with geometry for all the 4 “characters.”

Dancers: Michael Walsh and Maribeth Maxa

“Mining an ironic vein by turning technology against itself, AlienNATION undercuts the sociological ramifications of modern living. It is an astounding compendium of sci-fi images, textbook diagrams, special effects, and studio props, which together build multiple readings of the alien, the mysterious, and the obscure in American culture.

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.