couchprojects

• 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.