"Home of Tycoons," titled after a condominium complex in China,
investigates real estate marketing in Beijing during 2004 – only
moments before the old city would be completely demolished and
replaced by high-rises, stadiums and suburban gated communities.
Through photo documentation and sampling of poorly translated Chinese
to English sales materials, "Tycoons" explores the fantastical side of
home ownership in China.
An example, the brochure for Beijing's Long Island community declares
– "This isn't an age that dare not speak up wealth, this is an age
that needs to use wealth to sublime one's life."
Other residences studied include: MoMA, SOHO and The Home of Tycoons.
description: Video
Running Time: 16 minutes
A travelogue from Kiev, Ukraine taking place two years after The Orange Revolution. The videos premise is a tourist asking Ukrainians what it was like to participate in the Orange Revolution. Responses to the actual question were vague yet revealing of a cultural climate of constant political unrest. In the video, younger and older generations give starkly contrasting viewpoints and problems with translation metaphorically demonstrate the shortcomings in trying to understand a revolution from outside.
description: Video (15:23)
(in collaboration with Jim Fetterley)
Steve Kurtz Waiting is a portrait of the Buffalo-based artist Steve Kurtz in the purgatory of ongoing litigations stemming from allegations of bioterrorism. In critiquing the post-9/11 national security panic, he earned himself the label of a national security threat. A series of informal interviews with Kurtz is intertwined with animated screen captures of online news accounts of Steve Kurtz’s arrest. The video highlights how the federal government’s traditional local media campaign was outmaneuvered by Kurtz’s savvy internet-propagated grassroots campaign. The video takes up this mantle in a short format that is easily adaptable to internet dissemination.
Myfrienemies is a social networking site where anonymous users are connected to others who share dislikes of the same or similar types of people. Rather than create profile pages, visitors to the site can create anonymous lists of personal friend-enemies (frienemies) through detailed descriptions (testimonials) and labels (ex: cheaters, drunks, liars). Other people on the site can offer advice and commiserate with the anonymous testimonioals. If people dislike the same person, they can send personal messages to each other. To avoid inflammatory behavior, the site is programmed so that proper names are never revealed and bullying is disouraged. Myfrienemies aims to foster new friendships that are more similar to the bonds we make in a closed setting such as the office or academic environment; places where groups of disparate people find a common bond in their shared annoyance with a particular colleague.
New Babylon was inspired by Alexandre Medvedkin’s New Moscow (1939), where virtual renderings of Stalin’s Moscow were played in reverse so that the old city replaces the new. The source for my video, is a 3-D fly-through bootlegged from a Beijing real estate development sales office. The purpose of the original video was to celebrate decadence and to entice potential condominium buyers with Beijing’s modernization. My version plays the promotional video in reverse with grainy artifacts, producing an oppositional meaning by showing the destruction of a major highway and the collapse of a high-rise apartment building complex.
