Video (2016)

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In the gallery space, we see both a physical move in progress, as well as a dreamlike animation of things being thrown away. A dilapidated sofa lies on the floor, with a kitchen table piled on top of it, legs splayed in the air. Cardboard boxes, picture frames, and plastic tubs lie piled up around it. Projected onto the bottom surface of the over-turned table, we see pieces of furniture falling down from a great height, smashing into the ground and piling up. As we look at the projection, we see the entire contents of a small apartment slowly being thrown onto the pile, including both the actual kitchen table and sofa, as well as the boxes, plastic tubs, and pictures.

A fantastical re-imagination of the process of moving out of my Vancouver apartment, before moving to the United States, this work examines the idea of the purge, and of leaving everything behind as an act of self-renewal.

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Hand-Made Printer

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Taking as a starting point the cliche phrase, “I wish this moment could last forever,” this project attempts to extend the fleeting into the infinite. A never-ending, non-linear sequence of figures begins to cross the frame of the camera, heading out to some unspecified, never-arriving event. The longer the viewer watches the screen, the denser and livelier the crowd becomes. However, when the screen is left unwatched, the crowds slowly thin out and dwindle away down to an empty street. The video then presents the sense of an almost-never quite arriving event – a perfect moment and a glimpse of eternity that holds together only as long as the viewer cares to keep watching.

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The (in)security camera is a device which combines two often related but opposing ideas: safety and fear. From the perspective of a disembodied observer, the system appears to be normal, a security camera attached to a black and white CRT security monitor. However, when a moving object (such as a person) enters the camera’s field of view, the device becomes startled, and hides, lens down, in the corner. So long as someone remains in front of it the camera continues to hide, returning to its normal position only after confirming that the coast is clear.

Conceptually, the (in)security camera explores both ideas of surveillance and ideas of social anxiety or fear of others. Viewed from the perspective of surveillance, the system brings into comparison the roles of observer and the observed and the power disparity inherent in those two roles. The (in)security camera reverses these roles, with the mechanism of surveillance (the camera system) becoming the subject of observation by the public. No different than us at the end, the machine may believe in the need for ever increasing security and surveillance, but at the same time is terribly afraid of having that gaze turned upon itself. In the same act, the monitor creates and records an image which is free from human presence, useless as a record of an event, but perhaps a kind of aesthetic exploration of emptiness or stillness within the crowd.

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221A Artist Run Centre is pleased to present I live with twenty machines; I wish I lived with twenty wives. Drawing its title from a lyric in a generic mid-90ʼs indie-rock song, the exhibition brings together Vancouver based artists Scott Billings, Josh Hite and Jay Pozo whose work explores technology both as medium and as subject matter, highlighting the cultural transformations that have taken place over the last decade as mobile technologies, cameras, and social media (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) have allowed every aspect of our lives to be recorded, represented and re-lived online.

It should come as no surprise that technologies that promise to bring us together also serve to compartmentalize our experience of the world. Much of our daily experience consists of situations in which we attempt to abstract ourselves from our physicality – we seal out external sights and sounds and replace them with recorded / generated ones. We watch television and movies, and immerse ourselves in on-line games and virtual worlds whose explicit aim is the denial and substitution of the body and of physical experience. Even the act of watching has become more private – from the movie theatre (a large group experience), to the television (viewable alone or in a small group), down to the screen of a laptop or an iPhone (a decidedly solitary experience).

At the same time, we record and make documents of our lives like never before. Cameras and video recorders have shrunk down to a fraction of their original size, and are with us always (as part of our phones). Social Media sites like YouTube and Facebook host this content we record and make it available to anyone. The immense amount of documentation that we create, (and the monumentalization that is an implicit part of the act of recording), would seem to imply that we live unprecedentedly interesting lives, although that is almost surely not the case. At the logical extremes, it would seem that we are spending our days watching the lives of others online, and then making and posting documents of ourselves engaged in the act of watching.

Curated By: Dennis Rosenfeld
Exhibition: May 21 – Jun 26
Opening Reception: 8 pm, May 20
Artist Talk: 2 pm, Jun 18

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ILWTM;IWILWTW

Description

In the Fall of 2009, while Emily Carr University of Art + Design prepared to host CODE Live, students in a directed studies course with Emily Carr’s artists-in-residence Jer Thorp, M Simon Levin and Dennis Rosenfeld considered the implications and opportunities of observing, and being observed, in one of the most photographed locations in the city. During the 2010 Olympic Games, Granville Island, already a photo-saturated environment, will be shot from every angle: images from tourists’ cameras and cell- phones mix with surveillance and media images to document every moment from every conceivable perspective.

The product of this residency and months of dialogue and research with students, faculty, staff and alumni from across Emily Carr programs and within the larger cultural community, CODE.lab is a publicly-sited art project that asks visitors to consider questions of surveillance as they are met with a set of performances, constructions and interventions on the Island.

CODE.lab is: Jer Thorp, M. Simon Levin, Dennis Rosenfeld, Jay Pozo, Amy Zion, Kate Sansom, Lyndl Hall, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Emma Walter, Brodie Kitchen, Davide Pan, Makiko Yoshii, Monique Levesque, Dean Bennett, Catherine Dong, Karen Garrett de Luna, Rinat De Picciotto, Julia Higgs and Byron Peters, Josh Hite, Diana Wu, and John Deveaux

Description

Operating out of the Surrey Art Gallery’s Tech Lab, The Glocal Project is a collaborative, multifaceted artist-led project that examines the changing role of digital image making today. The digital revolution has included the global proliferation of millions of image-taking devices (such as digital cameras, video recorders, cell phones, and PDAs) and the sharing of billions of images through online networking and archival sites (such as Flickr). As this democratization of digital technologies makes the ability to make photographic images so ubiquitous, Glocal is interested in looking at the implications of the changing roles and relations of images within the field of visuality. Glocal is particularly interested in exploring the construction and relevance of the “unique” or “originary” image in relation to the multiple or “multitude”.

I worked on this project as a Technologist, working with lead artists M. Simon Levin, Jer Thorp and Sylvia Grace Borda. I assisted in developing a variety of hardware and software solutions, designing interactive installations, and helping conduct workshops with high school students.