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Micro Floral Transmissions to ALTair

Les LeVeque

2021 00:36:35 United StatesColorStereo16:94K video
Tags:
Artificial Intelligence, Language, Nature

Description

"In late December 2020 I began making videos of bouquets of Anemones using a microscope lens. The very limited focal length of the lens requires that the lens touch the subject to obtain focus. This imaging process developed into an odd intimacy between subject, apparatus and my body as I moved the handheld camera through the bouquets. The audio is made up of processed sync sound, samples from the Forbidden Planet soundtrack and computer voiced words from the Algorithms for Indeterminacy series. This project ended on March 7th, 2021 and is dedicated to the memory of my friend and neighbor Barbara Ess. The flowers used in this project were grown in the Hudson Valley on the ancestral homeland of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok (Mohican) peoples.

Algorithms for Indeterminacy is a generative text project. Imagining a relation between two, three or four specific words then submitting those words to an algorithm that generates a combined word list of their synonyms and/or antonyms."

–Les LeVeque

Micro Floral Transmissions to ALTair is a collection of ten short video pieces; each title is also available individually. Please email VDB with inquiries about individual pieces. 

First Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text life, life (486-word list), 3:03

Second Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text sick, rich (374-word list), 3:05

Third Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text nature, nothing, information (374-word list), 4:15

Fourth Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text plantation, penal, democracy (406-word list), 3:29

Fifth Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text uncovering, noplace (1,183-word list), 3:44

Sixth Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text property, experience, physical (343-word list), 3:53

Seventh Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text subjected, dominated, desire (892-word list), 4:27

Eighth Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text catastrophe, flesh, transport (676-word list), 3:41

Ninth Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text undo, consume, affliction, journey (678- word list), 3:27

Tenth Transmission
Algorithm for Indeterminacy text grief, search, commune, difference (763- word list), 3:29

About Les LeVeque

Les LeVeque is an artist who works with digital and analog electronic technology. His projects include single and multi-channel videos and video/computer-based installations. His projects have been exhibited and screened internationally. His work is also represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York City.

"In the work of Les LeVeque we encounter insights born — not only the formal strategies deployed, (condensation, expansion, reversal, mirroring...) — but of the ecstatic destruction of the reified "realities" of the consciousness industries, the purveyors of the spectacle. They remind us — and even now we are in need of that reminder — that these "realities," presented as eternal, are in fact shallow pliable, not fixed. They are subject to investigation; they may be reconfigured as games in which we are in control, where the terrors and seductions to which they subject us in their unilateral discourse may be altered according to our will, for our pleasure and amusement, for our provocation, for increasing our understanding of the machines of consciousness that process us. They are important viewing, and they are considerable achievements. They remind us that the insights and efforts of a single individual can be deployed via computational means to wreak havoc with the massively and expensively constructed tissue of lies that envelope us. And just as important: they are smart and they are fun."

— Keith Sandborn, January 15th, 2010