juxtaposition

4 square is an artwork that creates random juxtapositions of four different elements. Tap each square to change the images. Drag the squares to change their positions.

 hektor is one of the main characters in the non-aggressive narrative - a mode of Benjaminian storytelling. The NAN proposes the "continuation of a story which is just unfolding." I use digital and traditional media to create encounters between an ambiguous 'I' and potential 'You.' By embracing memory as a collage in motion through multiple characters, the NAN implies an origin story that may or may not have occurred. You are invited to co-invent this unfolding 'past,' and its openness suggests possibility and multiplicity. In a 1965 interview with Michael Kirby, John Cage said that theatre is not done to its viewers; they do it to themselves.

The NAN depends on that. As viewers re-member along with the narrative, they complete / become the work of art. Alongside the NAN, the self ('You' and 'I') is unfolding and in process. hektor.net is hektor's navigable artsite of photography, spoken word and video poetry. While viewers surf the site, hektor attempts to re-member: embody a past in the present. Floating memories, re-presented as art pieces, congeal in different patterns; from the "ruins of memory," viewers re-invent the past and its meaning, piecing together a story for themselves. However, similar to Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, where readers can tackle any chapter, in any order, to assemble a whole story, this narrative is built by the listener, according to which pieces they have seen, in what context, and in which order. Viewers continually bring new insights to possibility by juxtaposing visited and revisited pieces and ideas several times over.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

"Epiglobis" is an interactive video that explores consumption, desire, and issues pertaining to globalization through non-linear imagery and sounds called at random from a databank that generates continuously new juxtapositions.

(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment" is a collective experiment in database video and random access narrative. The installation is the work of many artists, each responsible for thirty seconds of video attempting to engage with paradoxes of digital culture and 21st. This is a collaborative project with Edgar Endress and the Students of the Art and Visual Technology Department at George Mason University. 

Artist Statement:(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment is a collective experiment in database video and random access narrative. The installation is the work of many artists, each responsible for thirty seconds of video attempting to engage with paradoxes of digital culture and 21st. century communications. The installation consists of a database containing the media contributions of each artist. A computer randomly retrieves video and audio and juxtaposes the media fragments in ten-second intervals on three projected screens and three stereo output systems. The process provides an endlessly randomized deconstruction and reconstruction of narrative and associative imagery in which meaning simultaneously forms and dissolves and the usual stabilities of conventional video making and viewing are put in flux. 

(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment is a collective work conceptualized by Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress and features the students of the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from the internet into a live action comic strip. From the time of its launch in 2005 to the end of 2008, the work used a live feed from social networking site LiveJournal. The work is currently using a feed from Flickr. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.

(Source: Project site)

synonymovie generates a sequence of images based on a single word: a "movie" that develops algorithmically through a chain of semantic relations. Initially, synonymovie asks the user to introduce a word, which will be the "seed" (as in "random seed," a number used to initialize a pseudorandom number generator) from which the image sequence will unfold. The sequence starts by finding an image related to the word, using an on-line image search engine. Then, a synonym for the word is obtained from a Web-based synonym server, together with its corresponding image, and so forth. The "movie" will end when a word without synonyms (or related images) is found.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)