Travels in Hyperreality

Someone gave me a free ticket to Toy Story 1, in pre-release at the Berlinale, in 1994.  I had no interest in cartoons, or in animation for that matter, but it was free so I went.

I was amazed.  I’d never seen anything like it: a hybrid of the mathematical meta-structuring of early Renaissance painting and photography.  The world turned.  I had to figure out how to do that.  So I went back to NY, where it was possible to take a class.  That was the beginning.

Early work, one of my first animations, in what was the "high def" of the day: 720 p x 486 p. I appropriated Rutger Hauer's death speech, from the 1982 Blade Runner. It was shown in "Animations," an early exhibition on the animation in fine art at PS1 MOMA, organized by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who later became the Documenta curator in 2012. "Animations" ran from October 14, 2001–January 20, 2002, and traveled to several locations.  The strategy was related to that of 1990s Post Modern photography, one of inversion of commercial modes.  So this was funny but also dark.

Another early animation from 1998! This one was actually 400 pixels x 243 pixels, not high def but "normal" definition. This one was part of a city-wide billboard project sponsored by the Speed Museum, in Louisville. The animation was shown in the Museum and the billboard was a a scanogram, also a new technology, printing digitally on plastic. These were proto-emoji btw.

As one of the few art world folks with the magical 3D skills, it was easy for me to get teaching gigs.  So in 1998, I started at Pratt Institute.   Having to deconstruct the Maya software and the 3D context in general, as part of my pedagogical practice, changed my art and my life.  This image was the currency of 3D animation at that time.  My all male students embraced it.

BloodRayne was introduced on the cover of Playboy Magazine in 2004. It further mobilized me.  Along with Claudia Herbst, another Pratt professor, I initiated a romantic rebellion, one of resistance and inversion directed against 3D culture, a culture that emerged from the DOD military research and post 9/11 gaming culture and was grossly misogynist.

In The Seasons, a seated woman in a pose of erotic abandon cycles clockwise on a rotating pedestal. As she cycles, she decomposes, a vine of roses surrounding her, blooming and then fading away. The room also revolves, though counter clockwise, while the animation camera pans back and forth. These movements function in counterpoint, to appear only on the edge of perception. Sound for the piece is of crumbling paper. The color scheme is white on white.

Maya menus; Albrecht Durer, Melancholia, 1514; Albrecht Durer, Perspective Machine, 1525; Micheal Snow’s 1967 40-minute Wavelength in 2.5 minutes

Structuralist animation installation

Empire, 2010, installation at the Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh

The Prison of the Body, 2014 3d animation, looped, 1 minute

The philosophy of the interface was formally framed in an exhibition curated by the media artist Rachel Clarke and myself in 2010, first at Cal State Sacramento as a show, a conference organized by their art history department and finally, a website.  As the simulations model rapidly replaced the photographic at this time, our website was more and more referenced.  At the urging of its growing audience, Rachel and I, along with Pat Reynolds, an artist/art historian whose expertise was in photography, restaged the The Real-Fake and composed its “manifesto.” At the same time, Donald Trump was elected and we entered its political epoch. 

inspired by a 1963 image by the same name by British photographer Jean Straker, known in the fifties for his erotic images of unconventional female beauties. His work was regularly confiscated by the British authorities, resulting in Straker becoming known as an activist who helped to change to the censorship laws of his time. 

I was in 2012, when augmented-reality interventions were first being staged in the art world (a Whitney Biennial AR intervention also took place in 2012), I was invited to produce and augmented object by SEEK-ART + mOsantimetre, a fine arts ceramics atelier in Istanbul. I produced the Nue Morte dish.  I was excited by its multivalence, seeming to integrate the real and the unreal into a truly liminal object.  It resonated.  With it I produced Double Narcissus, an art work demonstrating the Nue Morte porcelain dish as viewed through the Nue Morte custom app through a Mac tablet by a living avatar.

Alice's Giftshop: The Looking Glass Collection, 2014, a collection of liminal housewares, made for the New Museum shop,  as seen through The Looking Glass, 2014-18, an expanded augmented app..

The Alices Walking, 2014, A liminial opera and fashion show created in collaboration with Edmund Campion and produced by CNMAT, The Center For New Music and Audio Technology, UC Berkeley, and the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology in Chelsea.  The wearable augmented-reality scuptures were created by Claudia Hart and Julie Robinson.  The Alices App was created by Claudia Hart.  The Alices Walking film is by Artur Ratton, and produced by Genoa Mungin.