description: This video is documentation of the Andy Warhol robot that was designed by Alvaro Villa shortly before Warhol’s death for use in a stage show titled Andy Warhol: A No Man Show based on Warhol’s books, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) and Exposures. Production of the robot was cancelled after Warhol’s death.
The robot is now twenty years old and its outdated technology puts it between the realms of uncanny and absurd. The video documents Alvaro Villa, the inventor, demonstrating all of the features of the robot. Warhol’s muffled pre-recorded “I don’t know” responses take the robot out of the realm of an animatronic Chucky Cheese to a séance with the dead.
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.
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.
Infinite Depot is a unique document of a space that exists in some form all over the globe. The video’s format is a 45-minute single shot HD video that takes the viewer through a Home Depot store in a fluid dream-like epic, a cinematic technique directly inspired by Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Russian Ark.”
The two main characters meander through the cavernous aisles of a Home Depot store in Secaucus, New Jersey, transcending the mundane big-box environment as they slowly investigate and interact with everything but each other. In the background, shoppers zoom by at relative lightning speed, and the store displays become readymade sets. The soundtrack is a composition of recordings sampled from the store mixed to reflect the store’s multi-faceted spaces: the hugeness of some aisles and the intimacy of the showroom displays. The minimal plot culminates in an improvised dance performance by the main character. The dancer’s overstated movements fill the lighting aisles, yet go unnoticed by the Sunday morning shoppers.
Protect Yourself… is a compilation of online marketing materials from armored car manufacturers. In addition to undercover ballistic tests, the video collages industry interviews, auto shows and marketing propaganda in a form that transforms a corporate trade video into an action-packed thriller (minus Chuck Norris). The video is punctuated by humorous vignettes of evasive industry reps obsessed with corporate secrecy. This stands in stark contrast to the copious online materials showcasing vehicular violence.
Protect Yourself... is a compilation of online marketing materials from armored car manufacturers. In addition to undercover ballistic tests, the video collages industry interviews, auto shows and marketing propaganda in a form that transforms a corporate trade video into an action-packed thriller (minus Chuck Norris). The video is punctuated by humorous vignettes of evasive industry reps obsessed with corporate secrecy. This stands in stark contrast to the copious online materials showcasing vehicular violence.
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.
