couchprojects

digital c-print

hairring
video loop

test4c

• enclosure: http://couchprojects.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/test4c.mov 862165 video/quicktime, http://couchprojects.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/hairring.mov 2115661 video/quicktime
• description: 3-D renderings that mix simple gemoetric forms with realistic hair folicles. Installation consists of lightboxes and looping animations of the forms emulating breath.

• description: video (08:24)

  Loading Animated Version was initiated after discovering that the demand for streaming video and animation on American web sites had established a new realm of sweatshops proclaiming digital expertise. This video documented the email correspondence between an art director at a New York dot-com where I was working, and the project manager at a Hungarian graphic design studio that had been hired to cut costs. To illustrate the contrast of the characters, screen captures of Flash animations were juxtaposed with found footage scenes of Eastern Europe from the point of view of an American travel video. Loading Animated was intended to heighten awareness of an unknown and invisible, but common and often abused commercial exchange that became possible with the proliferation of desktop publishing software.

video still

• description: Video loop for projection (1:30)

  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.

screen capture

• description: Web site, cellphone messaging service

  Clip-FM allows users to send explicit and humorous animations via the web to a mobile phone. The pictogram animations are composed of 2-bit boxy pixel stick figures and symbols that express the ineffable. The plots of some of these mini-movies include: "Mom, Dad, I am gay" and "Your dog got hit by a car."

  www.clip-fm.com

View from entry, video monitor with video of Beijing model making factory and foot massage demonstrations

• description: One-day installation at ESL Projects in Los Angeles

  Using real estate marketing materials collected in Beijing, Fatty Duck transformed the droll, contemporary practice of high-end real estate development into a romantic, deconstructed homage to mid-century Communist dramas of urban progress.

  The small storefront was filled with a variety of images and videos. The video in the front of the store faded between scenes from an architecture model-making factory and a taxi ride on the chaotic streets of Beijing. Displayed on the interior wall, enlarged Xeroxes of the model-making factory’s models in-progress provided a metaphorical representation of the high velocity of new building developments. The other elements of the exhibition documented model home interiors that promote specific westernized lifestyles ranging from SoHo city-dweller to Long Island suburbanite. An architectural fly-through was projected on the back wall. The original source was collected from a development called "Home of Tycoons." This served as the title for the catalogue I created to supplement the exhibition.