Jason Eppink's Pixelator

(via Twitter friends)

From Jason Eppink's website:

Pixelator is an unauthorized on-going video art performance collaboration with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Clear Channel Communications, and its selected artists.

Since 2003, the MTA has made available for exhibition purposes 80 LED screens located at subway entrances across New York City. Unfortunately, the high cost of exhibiting (an estimated $274,000 per month per screen) prevents most artists from having access to these facilities. While the MTA's effort to create more opportunities for video art exhibition in public spaces is to be commended, selected works remain wholly fixated on commercial goods and media conglomerate events, a short-sighted curatorial choice that regrettably ignores the full potential of these promising exhibition spaces.

In an attempt to broaden the scope of MTA's video art series, Pixelator takes video pieces currently on display and diffuses them into a pleasant array of 45 blinking, color-changing squares. Since the project is an anonymous collaboration, the resulting video is almost entirely unplanned and unanticipated, with the original artists helping to create new works of art without any knowledge of their participation.

(Translation: Pixelator turns those ugly, blinding video billboard ads into art.)

Eppink also provides instructions on how to replicate the ad pixelator here!

Julien Pacaud

Julien Pacaud is a French illustrator and, apparently, a former astrophysician, international snooker champion, hypnotist and esperanto teacher. So basically, he's the coolest guy on the planet. Check out the rest of his work - all vintage-inspired and some great themes like giant people destroying stuff with lasers.



(via Vectro Ave)

Mato Atom

Too busy to post anything substantial these days (thesis lockdown), but here's a great little vid from Mato Atom. More of his work here.

Untitled Fragile Machine - Arthur Ganson

"Long before making sculpture I dreamed of being a surgeon. The challenge of working so carefully with my hands was satisfied by the creation of very fragile machines. A machine with no utilitarian purpose, this is as close to drawing or painting as I can get. After giving myself a starting point, the machine grew organically. The actions and movement of parts are meaningfully trivial."

Mark Jenkins

I'm a big fan of the work of DC- based Mark Jenkins. I'm particularly fond of the pieces that use human figures. The way he puts private moments on display and is able to convey affective experiences using bodies with obscured faces is really impressive.

Here's a quote from Jenkins:

"There is opposition, and risk, but I think that just shows that street art is the sort of frontier where the leading edge really does have to chew through the ice. And it's good for people to remember public space is a battleground, with the government, advertisers and artists all mixing and mashing, and even now the strange cross-pollination taking place as street artists sometimes become brands, and brands camouflaging as street art creating complex hybrids or impersonators. I think it's understanding the strangeness of the playing field where you'll realize that painting street artists, writers, as the bad guys is a shallow view.“ -Mark Jenkins (via My Modern Met)

Nosaj Thing

Nosaj Thing Visual Show Compilation Test Shoot from Adam Guzman on Vimeo.

Adam Guzman and Julia Tsao collaborate on the Nosaj Thing visual show. The result is awesome.

Return as an Animal

(via Changethethought)

'Return as an Animal' is a short film by motionographer/animator Bruno B. Dicolla. It's supposed to be about the myth of the eternal return of life after death. I like it because it lets me watch two of my favorite things at the same time: neon animation and semi-idle animals. Seriously, I used to spend hours watching things like 'Untamed Africa' on Discovery Channel. I especially loved it when they gave big cats names and followed them around for months (e.g. "Nala is beginning to distance herself from her cubs, who must learn to fend for themselves blah blah.") I generally just lost interest when the program was about birds. Go figure.

Anyway, Dicolla was also featured in the Floating World Animation Festival last June. Check out the neat promo vid they used for the festival here.


PS Got a heads up that I put the wrong link for the Washed Out track. It's all fixed now.

Data Portraits

(image via Swiss Miss)

The Swiss Miss posted this great link to a project by some nerd/fellow PhD freak named Aaron Zinman at the MIT Media Labs. The project, Personas, basically goes through the web, draws info using a mysterious algorithmic process and puts up a 'seemingly authoritative' profile. Here's the underlying philosophy:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Try it here.

The Mess Inside

I passed by the Guildford Lane Gallery yesterday and caught this multi-channel installation by Lucy Benson. Unfortunately, she was having some technical issues and had to turn off the projector and the sound. So I wasn't able to really take in the piece as a whole. Still, I really liked the videos programmed into the smaller screens, particularly the kaleidoscopic hand images that opened up into static.