loop

Let’s Play is part of an ongoing series of games based on ancient Greek figuresand their punishments. Sisyphus, Prometheus, Tantalus, Danaids and Zeno, thephilosopher known for his paradoxes, are represented by the CPU player, thecomputer’s Central Processing Unit. In this CPU edition, the computer does it allby itself, both simulating and playing the game, cutting out the player entirely.Every time the reload button is activated, the game starts afresh. It may seemlike watching an animated GIF or a video file, but it’s the computer playing,pushing a rock or having its liver eaten. Again and again. Let’s Play presents aworld closed in on itself, behaving according to its own logic, its own code. Aworld stuck in a frustrating loop.

(source: Description from the schedule)

Tales of Automation is a collection of nine short "tales" that explore the effects of digital automation - algorithmic behavior modification, quantified feedback, life-logging, etc. - on daily life and subjectivity. Each tale is a never-ending cycle of asynchronous loops (of text and video) that present a single character at a moment of distracted attention, attempting and always failing to self-narrate experience in its complexity, materiality and abstraction. Notifications, data and spam intrude on consciousness at the cusp of self-awareness. Vision is composited, filtered and collaged. The multiplicity and variability of nested loops means that the short fictions are without beginnings or ends, or rather they begin in medias res and end when the nature of the characters' situation becomes evident.

The work is best presented in full screen mode on any browser, but preferably Chrome. Interaction with each tale involves a simple click, page scroll or mouse movement. In Tale 7, the central image can be dragged to read what is underneath. There is no sound in this work.

(Source: Author's description)

One day in 2008 in Malaysia, by chance, I videotaped two starkly ordinary events: a dying kitten and a chained monkey. Give me Your Light explores the archetypal capacity of these creatures. The archetypes are death and enslavement. The dying abandoned kitten in a parking lot stands-in for the fatally ill, homeless runaways and abandoned children. The chained monkey suggests slaves, prisoners, abductees, captives, convicts, detainees and internees. Give me Your Light is about the limits of empathy and ubiquitous complicity. The display of Give me Your Light is not a linear video, it is a set of video-clips, sounds, music and words reassembled every two minutes into a new sequence by an algorithm. Events repeat but never in the same order. Clips appear in both monochrome and colour, with music and without, with sound and silent. Contextual structure and affective content collide. (Source: http://glia.ca/2011/BNL/)

The great Japanese travel artists - Basho, Hiroshige, Soseki - are used as models for a digital journal about traveling the Tokaido train line (Kyoto-Tokyo) with my daughter. Working against the implicit linearity of the journey-the forward motion of the train-the six-minute video loop, with generative haiku, is designed to evoke the ephemeral jolts of contemporary travel and to uncover the moments lost in any narrative retelling.

(Source: Author's description)