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SlowerFaster
Category: installation
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GodsEye
The title GodsEye is borrowed from the computer gaming term God’s eye Perspective which positions the player as God/General/Wizard floating above the world and awarded total control over cities, armies and minions.
GodsEye is an installation consisting of four computer sculptures that make up a techno- /neo-medieval landscape built around the functional hardware elements of a computer desktop environment: keyboard, mouse, monitor, tower, etc.
Formally, it draws from the subcultures of custom computer case modifications, hardware hacking, computer game modification and sampling.
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New Works
Los Angeles based Stern has been involved in video gaming culture as a practitioner and theorist for many years. He is presently on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts. The works in the show are a result of the artist’s obsessive participation in online fantasy games, most recently a yearlong immersion (2000 hours played) in World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) with more than 10 million players worldwide.
His new works – kinetic shadow sculptures and 3D computer animation videos – use a mash-up of documentary material from online forums, clip art, YouTube videos, midi music, electronics, and hand made puppets. They mine the online gaming world at its paradoxical extremes: on one hand, an untenable perversity of life spent slaying an endless stream of virtual monsters, on the other, an ultimate mirroring of the most familiar social dynamics. The struggles with masculinity, honor, aggression, faith, love and self worth are embroiled with the gameworld’s vernacular aesthetics.
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Vietnam Romance
Vietnam Romance, recreates and interrogates the fictionalized history of the Vietnam War and its culturally commodified remains through a mash-up of cultural artifacts drawn primarily from Hollywood film culture as well as war literature, comic books, popular music, collectable war memorabilia, and adventure tourist packages.
Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and Deathmatch veterans pitting tourists vs. adventurers, history vs. its fantasies, and games vs. cinema. Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”
At Postmasters, the project is presented as a multiscreen projection-mapped installation. The presentation alternates between a computer generated panoramic tour through a Fantastical Vietnam created on the fly from online data scraped from tourist information sites, google maps, Ebay war memorabilia listings, top of the charts music archives, and a Vietnam movie database of characters, actors and extras. In the gallery, Vietnam Romance can be experienced either as a playable computer game or as a generative animation. The imagery in the game is created entirely from Eddo Stern’s watercolor paintings processed into 3D models.
The game includes these playable vignettes:
Scene 1: FORTUNATE SON
Scene 2: MOJAVE
Scene 3: APACHE
Scene 4: IN COUNTRY
Scene 5 : THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING
Scene 6: THE TRACKS OF MY TEARS
Scene 7: THE DEER HUNTER
Scene 8: THE LUNCH LADY
Scene 9: HO-CHI-MINH TO HANOI
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Invertigo
INVERTIGO stages a blurring of boundaries in and between bodies in disparate spaces, between the public space of the gallery and the electronic network of the World Wide Web.
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer encounters the screen space of a video projection which is inhabited by the ethereal presence of individuals on the web. With the presence of each new visitor to the web site, a trace of a new body appears in the projection. Each ‘webpresence’ is also marked by numerical figures, traces of individuals’ IP addresses, scrolling on a suspended monitor on the gallery’s far wall.
In the physical space of the gallery, a solitary swing acts as the main component and driving mechanism of the piece, spanning ‘real’ and virtual space, and acting as a feedback mechanism between the two. Through the physical act of swinging, audience members edit the video images that appear on the video screen. As they move, the images shift between representations that evoke feelings of psychological distance and more intimate ones, flickering between a fast cut and a soft caress. Each swing arc marks time and the rhythm of movement, while conjuring up cinematic fragments and the sensations of bodily feedback. The web ‘screen’ space mimics this editing and generates ‘webpresence’ in the gallery.
Webpresence is marked by a rush of black-and-white bodies across the scrims. A fleeting IP address trace on a monitor opposite the scrims also records this virtual body. The gallery viewer becomes an editor of the imagery, collapsing landscapes. Webpresence interrupts the gallery editing.
Two spy cameras surveyed the state of the gallery installation. A camera mounted spy-style on the ceiling sent an overview to the web. A camera on the swingtop translated the body-motion of each viewer. Their points of view were uploaded and saved every 15 seconds to break-down activity in the gallery frame-by-frame.
Images from moments on several days were archived on the invertigo website Moving the cursor over the frames switched points of view.
During the exhibition, this applet revealed the presence of web viewers and counted the number of swings in the gallery. Webpresence was marked by an IP address that scrolled up and faded away.
The applet was visible to people in the gallery on a monitor suspended opposite the scrims. It was also visible from the website (accessible in a corner of the gallery or remotely).
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DissemiNET
Walker Art Center Digital Studies CollectionDesigned as a Java-based client-server system, dissemiNET is a curated and public participatory system conceived to elaborate a diaspora on the web. Creating a repository for personal and social memory, dissemiNET uses Internet technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits, retrievals, and loss)through which we experience memory. On a boundary between identity (i.e. national and personal) and its dispersal over the web, dissemiNET is conceived to trace connections between people in terms of “digi-texts,” creating a cross-linked, communal storytelling space. Drawing parallels between diasporas and the dispersal of meaning over the web, dissemiNET provides spaces for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell stories about their own experiences with homelessness and dispersal. Overtime, dissemiNET has become a collection of such stories of errancy
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This kind of devils knows no rules!
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Breakout
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Travel Advisory
