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The robot is now twenty years old and its outdated technology puts it between the realms of uncanny and absurd.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.
