Unnatural Disasters
Houses For Sale Ambient N | Houses For Sale Chill Dark | Houses For Sale Ambient M
London Onion
- Drawings where climate change meets obliviousness.
- Drawings contrasting the lexicon of real estate advertising with the natural world.
- Drawings made by mailing packages containing primative styli between the east and west coast.
- Inspired by the conceptual activities of Allen Kaprow this project documents my activities in a public park by the pacific ocean. The site uses Flash and video to create a series of little movies which are presented at varying speeds. The minimal gestures alter the native video formats in both ratio and length to provoke an altered perception. The accompanying texts are taken from Kaprow's, "Some Statements on Happenings," and Sol Lewitt's, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," in 1971. John Baldessari responded to Lewitt's sentences in his 1972 video, "Baldessari Sings Lewitt."
Houses For Sale Ambient N | Houses For Sale Chill Dark | Houses For Sale Ambient M
- With curatorial process and still images appropriated from the web these videos explore the varied nature of living spaces where the private becomes public. From the series Love Your Pictures with public domain audio compositions by Frank Nora.
- This short film uses public domain found footage. Given the global preoccupation with oil and fossil fuels this film satirizes the American passion for driving and our incoherent energy policy.
- This short film is a found footage cut up of a hygiene film from the 1950s. All of the shots were selected using a random process—dice rolling. All shot placements in the film were also chosen by random process.
- Aqua is a response to the disaster in New Orleans. It uses historical texts, films, and audio to explore flood stories. Aqua proposes a pattern of power relationships not simply between civilization and nature but between disparate socio-economic groups--as evidenced by the records appropriated here.
Some of our most striking flood catastrophes include the 1889 Johnstown Pennsylvania flood which killed over 2,200 people, the 1948 Vanport Oregon flood which left 50,000 homeless, the Los Angeles New Year’s flood of 1934 and the St. Francis Dam Disaster
of 1928 which killed over 500.
- Karawane is based on a text-sound poem by dada artist Hugo Ball written in 1917. This animated short film was created using Live Type. In this way, the animation generates a comparison with southland car salesman Cal Worthington and asks: what would it look like if ‘blago bung’ were on sale? The audio is performed by Jerome Rothenberg and Bertrum Turetzky.
London Onion
- This short film is inspired by London Onion, a sound poem by Kurt Schwitters, written in 1946. The audio track features poet, translator, and author Jerome Rothenberg reading Schwitters' poem accompanied by Bertrum Turetzky playing the contrabass.
- This project addresses the microbiology of human reproduction and infertility while taking the form of a game whose goal is reproductive success. A moving field of photomicrographs, x-rays, and sonography, occupies the right of the screen. By moving the mouse over this field the user may find the hidden links leading to reproductive results. The left side contains observations of nature and science from Aristotle, Linnaeus, Georges Braque, Vannevar Bush, and Max Frisch. The game runs in an infinite loop.
- In Revisiting September 11, 19[72], Mark Polishook and I collaborate to juxtapose the September 11 terrorist attacks against the larger context of the past. By connecting the seemingly mundane year of 1972 to the present day, Polishook and Hutton suggest that trauma erodes the complexities of memory and perception, thus shattering our understanding of what was and what is. As experienced in their installation, remembrances are fleeting and ephemeral - paradoxically present and absent.
Revisiting September 11, 19[72] was installed in the Jack Straw New Media Gallery in Seattle, WA from 9/11/02 - 11/29/02
- Victorian.NET is a narrative inspired by the resurgence of written communications resulting from the speed and accessibility of e-mail. The work is informed by the continuing fascination with courtly love and traditional male and female gender roles which began in the middle ages. Within these overarching dialogs there is the machine interface which offers its own suggestions and allusions. In Victorian.NET, as with on-line relationships, the machine becomes an extension of the body. The machine interface becomes armor and avatar willing to send, reply, and forward our most intimate desires without question or physical danger. Victorian.NET is illustrated with instructions from Japanese Shiatzu pressure point massage. These illustrations serve as a metaphor reflecting the point and click corporeality of the computer interface. The narrative follows the conversations of Cheri and Jules who are geographically
separated. Their dialogs are highly suggestive and completely modern yet; through the use of double entendre, sensuality, and wit, revisit the genre of courtly love.
- Woman Words is a rhizome web piece which explores variations on the meaning of the word woman. I began by defining six possible meanings of the word woman and allowing free association to make up the rest. From woman, I began with the words, girl, goddess, object, queen, domestic, and mother. While the piece is highly linguistic and based upon a free association of words the iconography sets up a parallel interface where location in the rhizome can be mapped by the user. The icons are influenced by iconography more commonly associated with the non-linguistic glyphs found in rest rooms, airports, and computer interfaces--glyphs used in locations where language is less meaningful or portable than iconography. As the user goes deeper into the linguistic side of the rhizome the icons remain visible as a map showing how far they have moved from the original starting point of "woman."
- Cyber*Babes (A Fan Dance For Adults) explores the meaning and dialog of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The piece repeatedly asks the user to state whether they are over 18 years of age or under 18 years of age. The "under 18" links in the interface intend to filter content prohibited by the Telecommunications Act from the wrong user. Ironically, this is a point of great frustration for users seeking pornography. If the user chooses under 18 in the question and answer sections they are vectored into sites more suitable to their age--or the mentality of the censors. If the user chooses over 18 they proceed in a linear manner through the fan dance. Cyber*Babes appropriates other web sites to complete the dialog on the Telecommunications Act. The links to the internet outside Cyber*Babes are chosen from two categories. The first explores the content and commentary surrounding the Telecommunications Act. The second category provides links of an opposing context by sending the user to some of the other offensive material on the internet. These links include the Internet's consumerist propensities, America's flirtation with "political correctness," gruesome military documentation, the search for pornography on the internet, and the exploitation of animals. Cyber*Babes concludes by sending users who are still looking for nudity to a another web site whose purpose is to count how many people visit it seeking pornography.