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| The invitational component of the AIM V: SYZYGY (the human
remix) exhibition has been curated by Lynzie Baldwin, AIM director. |
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Marsia Alexander-Clarke |
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| UT COELUM |
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| Video Installation |
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Music by Ethan Nasreddin-Longo
Choir: Local Color
Director: Anna Ancheta |
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UT COELUM
is a powerfully emotional product of video and audio remixing,
which creates a unified, captivating experience for the viewer.
The original video footage is of Local Color, a 14-woman a
cappella choir performing UT COELUM – a composition by
Ethan Nasreddin-Longo based on a text by Lipsius. Through extensive
post-production work, Alexander-Clarke weaves a multi-layered
tapestry of video and audio fragments, producing a sonic well
set against a constantly shifting visual field. Twelve monitors
display an undulating field of fractured facial features, while
the audio remix gives the effect of one augmented murmer, rather
than that of individual voices.
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Lew Baldwin |
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| duplex |
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| Video Installation |
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“The simplest and most popular cosmological
model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10
to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that
it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger
any less real.”
_ Alfred T. Kamajian, Scientific American
Combining digital technologies and cinematic illusion, duplex is a rhythmic
work of operatic proportion, depicting a parallel universe in which one’s
life is shadowed by an alter-ego existing in the same space-time continuum.In
duplex, Baldwin asks the viewer to imagine what your alter-ego would
be like if he or she were to walk alongside you, paralleling and/or participating
in your life. If science somehow managed to bend the cosmic horizon to
open a doorway to a parallel existence, the resulting manifestation of
any given person’s self might well be far different that one ever
imagined. Baldwin proposes that everything is relative, from age to appearance
to behavior, dependant upon our perception of both ourselves and of those
around us.
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Bryan Jackson |
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| The Whippoorwill |
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| Installation |
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Both repulsive and oddly compelling, Bryan
Jackson’s The Whippoorwill speaks to our relationship with
broadcast
television technologies and the news media – how they shape our experience
of the world in which we live, how we are linked to them, and in what manner
they represent human life and death. Based on the artist’s childhood,
television-mediated, experience of a 1978 paddleboat disaster in Osage
City, Kansas, The Whippoorwill positions the giant Midwest “river
cat” as a metaphor for mass media communications – the monstrous
gape-mouthed resident of dark, murky waters is often mythologized as a
creature that can and will consume a full-grown human being; in much the
way that the television is capable of consuming our understanding
of the world. The centerpiece of this unique installation is a grotesque,
yet charming resin catfish, hybridized with the details of a simulated-wood
TV cabinet. Placed near a shelf-full of desirable little, brightly colored
catfish fashioned out of hard candy – the viewer is presented with
both the disturbing and powerful potentials of mass media communications
as well as the consumable, pleasurable, and somehow addictive qualities
of the same.
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Lev Manovich |
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| Mission to Earth |
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| C-Prints, 2003, United States |
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Making its North American debut in the
AIM V: SYZYGY exhibition, Mission to Earth tells the story of
Inga, an alien who after spending twenty years on Earth, is finally
given the chance to return to her own planet, Alpha-1.An allegory
about the Cold War and immigration, Mission to Earth utilizes
footage of a secret radio telescope built in former Soviet Union
in 1971. The film is edited in real time by custom software,
rendering each run of the piece different from the last. The
software determines the screen layout, number of windows on the
screen, and each window’s content, using a script and system
of rules defined by the authors. In a great deal of the narrative
nearly all choices are left to the software; however in some
points they specified exactly what the viewer sees in a particular
moment in time.Mission to Earth is the latest edition of the
five-year Soft Cinema project, which investigates new creative
possibilities at the intersection
of cinema, new media, and architecture. For further information,
visit www.manovich.net/softcinema/
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Bruce Yonemoto |
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| Sealed |
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| Mixed Media Installation, 2004 |
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“On the blank screen, a luminous
disk was projected without any images of people or landscapes. … I
was blinded by the light from the projector lamp and saw in the
screen two holes large enough to allow a man to pass through.
I put my head through one of them. A panorama of the city was
spread out before my eyes. Aragon and Breton had their bellies
impaled on two cathedral spires. I understood that they also
had wanted to see what was happening behind the screen and the
great beauty of their suicide was revealed to me.”
Bruce Yonemoto’s Sealed addresses the condition of humans
living in an increasingly digital age, an age in which our bodies
are being constantly pummeled
by a blinding, ceaseless stream of light projectiles. Yonemoto posits
that the human body has become akin to the movie screens of old – a
surface which catches light in order to make visible, real, that which
is projected upon it. However it can be nearly impossible, with millions
of disembodied commercial images barreling at us, to truly discern the
fictive structure of the media, as Robert Desnos does above. Sealed challenges
the viewer to examine our contemporary experience of “self”,
and questions whether we, as humans living in a society increasingly
permeated by communications technologies, have lost our facility of critical
expression and become both numb and mute observers of unconscious optics.
Yonemoto asks if our natural orifices for the disposal of information
input have been “sealed”, leaving us in smooth-skinned, anal-less
bodies – bodies which once effectively consumed, digested and evacuated
a constant stream of images and other media input, but can no longer
do so. Sealed is an eloquent attempt to metonymically “slice open” our
screen skins, retaining only those images that define our existence.
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Created in 1999 by co-founders Janet Owen and Jim Keller, AIM
originated in response to the phenomenon of communications, technology,
and distribution inno-vations merging together to create global
networks and tools, including the internet. |
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