3 POINT PERSPECTIVE
Film programme curated by Kendra Gaeta
Capitalizing on appropriated or recontextualized media and technological
exploration, there is a emerging vein of video art encouraging us
to examine our relationship to culture and the changing nature of
this dynamic. This moment finds itself closely rooted alongside
historic works by artists like Nam June Paik, whose work considers
form and culture at large over empathetic bridge-building and individual
experience. The artists have come of age in 1980's America, a time
that ushered in a total informational revolution, and they have
crossed a threshold. They were the last generation to see both sides,
and the first to totally adopt. Using popular culture as the reference
point, their work animates the subjectivity of a generation growing
up fueled by technological development and the hyper-speed of the
culture industry.
The work is marked by a cultivated sense of self-awareness and
cultural savvy. Paul Slocum's
Combat references a whole era with the simple color
palette and familiar block-style images created by his homemade
Atari video synthesizer. Formally and aesthetically derived straight
from popular culture and (dated) technological advent, the HTML
characters dancing across the screen in Paper Rad's
Welcome to My Homepage are lifted straight from
the sides of sugar-cereal boxes and Saturday morning cartoons. This
type of work suggests a kind of cultural foreshadowing, the generational
trajectory between the Atari Age and the Internet Era, using language
that we're likely to remember firsthand. It's far less social critique
than party from Grade 5, and this is exactly the point.
The past 30 years have seen technological growing pains perhaps
not rivaled since the industrial revolution. Was ever one step taken
that didn¹t ripple out into 15,000 embarrassing bad-idea variations?
Found footage time capsules, such as Kent
Lambert's Gaijin and Rebekah
Rutkoff's 3 Point Perspective aren't just
reminders of awkward moments in-between, they are embodiments of
imperfect models. Ruthkoff's video, a dance routine from a mid-80's
high school talent show, is breaking down into 8mm video degeneration
at a speed almost as remarkable as the outfit, hair, and hightops
combination of its subject. The video remains unedited, as she found
it, the mark of time imposed by cultural distance as much as the
technological break-down. And though there are other ties to my
personal timeline, from the moment a short clip of the TV show Mr.
Belvedere invades Kent Lambert's birthday party footage, Gaijin
will always reverberate (for me) with Friday nights at home in,
yes, Grade 5.
These messengers from the past come fully loaded. The out-moded
images and obsolete machines encourage us to examine the cultural
trial and error, linking our selves now to our selves then in the
very parlance of the past. It's a matter of perspective that the
hyper-speed of technology and consumption rarely affords us and
an appropriation of the tools we¹ve inherited: our popular
culture backdrop and its means of communication. Private_Eyez.mid
uses the familiar song from the 80's, but a midi version. An 80's
spin on an 80's favorite. It sounds like video games and radio rock
meets Radio Shack, and with just visuals of hand-claps, it looks
like a minimalist version the over-literal videos of the era. There¹s
no major statement, except how the juxtoposition plays out: the
midi, the pop song, and videos from that time are ubiquitous enough
so that those even mildly exposed to culture of the 80's can process
the disconnect and playful intention.
Kelly Oliver's Niche
and Abbey Williams'
Moon in Gemini approach a more personal idea of
the historic narrative. Niche pools from the quintessentially suburban,
using quick references as reminders of what that collective vision
solidly is. An empty home, with only traces of people, examines
the changing nature of suburbia, a shift toward containment and
domestic anxiety. Williams' video, which started out as a 3-walled
installation, is the most personal story of any of these. It's a
dramatization of desire and the condition that keeps searching for
the unattainable. The perfect (seeming) boyfriend will kiss you
in public and display his affections. It will look 'believable'.
If you sing for him, he may find you. But given the imperfections
of real life and the desperation of pop music, the fantasy you're
afforded by sitting back and watching ultimately seems far sexier.
It is the reality and discordance from idealized versions that makes
both videos so lonely-feeling. The (in)ability to find perfection
is less critique than internalization of very social notions.
The precision flawlessness informing our social ideals is a fragile
illusion. Its rigidity conditions us to detect the slightest deviation,
making it perfect for the kind of appropriation in The Manipulators
by Andrew Jeffrey Wright
and Clare Rojas. Animated models from the pages
of fashion magazines physically waste away or grow hairy, get pimples
and reveal their inner thoughts. The work is far from subtle or
slight, and its off-handed vandal style humor takes off in opposition
to the earnestness of those pages. That it would be so easy to hijack
the beautiful with words like 'hump' and 'dong', the glamorous with
hand-drawn mustachios, and the chic with debased potty humor is
comforting. It's a warning, of sorts, for the buyer to beware, and
of the dangers of simply taking what is given. And an invitation
to take these things on with simple means. Bryan
Boyce's 30 Seconds Hate seems likewise
an act of vandalism provoked. The tag line to his video is 'Fox
News and Henry Kissinger want to kill you', and he's reedited an
entire interview with the former Secretary of State, word by word,
until his exact words proclaim war on 'all happy people'.
The Manipulators and 30 Seconds Hate are clever responses to the
one-way valve of culture and politics, and the perspective they
provide disrupts the auto-reactions, delivering the audience to
where the media cuts. How the original and appropriated versions
compare are very much the intentions of Dara
Greenwald's Strategic Cyber Defense, Jim
Finn's Decision 80, and Bryan Boyce's
30 Seconds Hate. All three are video recuts, but each references
the original in very different ways.
Strategic Cyber Defense is a re-edited version
of a DARPA (US Department of Defense organization) training video.
The reinactment includes an 'imaginary' enemy, Kurac, located on
the map in the same spot as its real life soundalike. Our enemies
employ sinister gazes while our boys outsmart them from behind tech
heavy switchboards. Greenwald's edit capitalizes on the ridiculousness
of DARPA's Bizarro World construction and failed Hollywood caricatures
of 'villain' and 'hero', while humor serves as the way-out while
we process the fact that this is no joke.
Finn's video Decision 80 presents another no-joke scenario. During
the 1980 Democratic National Convention, Jimmy Carter addressed
a nation at a crossroads. 'If you succumb to a dream world, you'll
wake up to a nightmare', he warned, and as fate would have it, the
Republicans would take the White House. Finn's contrast of foreboding
convention footage to Reagan's inaugural fanfare remembers a nation
at the beginning of a new age, just entering the dream world. Presenting
this moment as the end of one era and the beginning of another begins
the historical what-if game. This analysis, perfectly timed for
a current events comparison, confronts ideas of cultural amnesia,
who decides what can stay or go, and how important it is we take
an active role in steering through the past and the present.
Those who write history become the gatekeepers of our collective
memory, and whatever we have beyond that is a more personal type
of marking stick. In the scheme of humanity we hope to recognize
the story of our own generation and be distinguished from whatever
came before and whatever will come after. That it would appear nostalgic
is logical. That we can all relate to it is cultural. It's a form
of analysis that begins to close the gap between remembering and
replacing.
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independent
dist 
georgian
quarter 
city
central 
docklands
artists
