automatism and (-)(+) feedback is a 3:29-minute video made from shot footage of a 10-year-old child playing Zombie Smash on a handheld device. The video footage and sound have been repeatedly rescanned and resampled using a television and a number of old analog video cameras.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
Gaijin = A non-Japanese person. In 1984 I celebrated my eighth birthday on my mother's island. My Uncle Pat set a VHS camcorder up on a tripod and left it running to record the festivities. A year or two later, I accidentally recorded a snippet of the sitcom Mr. Belvedere over some of the footage.
In an interview I did earlier this year for the Milan Game Video/Art exhibition, I deflected a question about the connection between Hymn of Reckoning and Reckoning 3, discouraging the idea that there was much of a link between the two videos, apart from their names and their use of video game material. Now that I’ve thought about it more, I can tease out more connections.
Mike Builds a Shelter is a performance comedy with apocalyptic overtones, a narrative extension of Smith's installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar. In this darkly humorous morality play, Smith contrasts Mike's rural adventures in a pastoral landscape with his home fallout shelter. Throughout, the dual narratives are intercut with episodes of Mike's Show on cable, in which Mike's banal domestic activities are eagerly if passively received by living-room TV viewers.
This was the epitome of the one-video-a-night project: an un-altered home video clip set to a sped-up Game Boy version of a Roommate song, rendered as Video Art by Duchamp-derived title (suggested by the original wearer of the Pac-Man costume).
The everyday performance of domestic labor is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers.
In this world, motion capture technology translates movement into data that can be unbound from the human body. Yvonne’s No Manifesto becomes a framework for understanding the existential impact of this new dataset. What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without the basic premise of embodiment and breath?
O.U.T. is a work documenting the emergence of computer games which train players to fight in cities among civilians, (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). O.U.T. contains sampled footage and machinima (stories told with video games) from five military simulation games. Following is a documentation of the performance, (Operation Urban Terrain), an urban wireless intervention by Anne-Marie Schleiner and an international cast of game expert and art activist collaborators.
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
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
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
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
RECKONING 3 is the first in a series of investigations into:
1. Terror and wonder in big-budget virtual worlds
2. The mutability, fragility and loneliness of technologically mediated social identities and friendships
3. The queerness and malevolence of archetypal masculinity
4. The diminishing distance between "real" and "artificial" humanity
5. The poetics of blockbuster aesthetics
46+ years after Debord wrote "...the heart of the unrealism of the real society...," a nine-year-old child is instructed to repeatedly recite thesis #6 from The Society of the Spectacle. The recitations are re-mixed at one-second intervals forming a fragmented, discursive, strangely optimistic and melancholic chant. Additional audio is provided by the child's playing a Call of Duty: Back OPS game.
"This is an experimental virtual reality artwork, and while it offers opportunity for interaction, calling this a game goes too far. It is a disappointment simulator, a best-artist-ever-all-the-time artist simulator, a hospice simulator. The experience speaks to the art-making process, impostor syndrome, decay, archives on the moon, and a persistent exile."
— Evan Meaney
*Please note ++ We Will Love You For Ever requires either HTC Vive or Oculus Rift to operate.
In this interview, communications theorist, Gene Youngblood (b. 1942) maps out the various stages of the development of video technology and its philosophical implications for human interaction. The range of topics discussed moves beyond video to offer an extensive and rich survey of American culture from the 1960s to the present moment. In addition to discussing his canonical text, Expanded Cinema, Youngblood shares stories from his early days as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where he gained intimate knowledge of the media’s politics of representation. With the acuity of hindsight, Youngblood discusses important self-discoveries, and his life-changing decision to move from the mainstream media into the world of the underground press.