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December 3rd, 1998--12.03-1:17 A.M.

Anthony Discenza

1999 00:07:12 United StatesEnglishColorStereo

Description

A specific period of late-night TV channel surfing is dissected and manipulated through fast forward and freeze frame. Cultural icons (Roseanne, Mary Tyler Moore, The Golden Girls) can occasionally be glimpsed amongst the detritus, while the echoing and ghostly soundtrack pays homage to the cultural isolation of solitary viewing.

"The ideas in much of my recent work orbit elliptically around the attempt to generate new forms out of the destruction or decay of appropriated material—trying to capture the traces of things as they dissipate, and findings ways of rendering those traces visible. Paired with this is a morbid fascination with the endless stream of mediated images that surrounds and informs our daily lives.... The video signal compacted, compressed, imploded—methodologies to reduce disparate visual events into a discrete form. A destruction of any hierarchies of content through the formation of a schizophrenic space in which all information is equivalent and non-orderable, generated through an alchemical shift whereby the many are unified through a kind of annihilation. Through the compression/decay of the electronic signal which transmits them, images are drained of all meaning save that of sensory data, of information... a densely scrambled, post-space of visual detritus...."

—Anthony Discenza

This title is also available on Anthony Discenza Videoworks: Volume 1.

About Anthony Discenza

Anthony Discenza was born in New Jersey and currently lives in Oakland, California. He received his undergraduate degree in Studio Art at Wesleyan University in 1990, and an MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2000. In addition to various individual projects, he participates in HalfLifers—an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist, Torsten Z. Burns. Discenza's solo and collaborative work has been shown at numerous national and international venues, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Video Festival, the Pandaemonium Festival, The Pacific Film Archive, The Impakt Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  He was recently included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.