Launch Artwork

To Hold a Future Body So Close To One's Own

Description

This interactive web-gallery is a piece within the framework of a larger multi-medium artistic project known as the Ceibas Cycle whose main goal to describe two important aspects of digital culture. First, the videos in the gallery are all derived from introducing spoken language to the hexadecimal code of a digital video file. The file then becomes corrupted (Hex doesn't know what to do with love letters) and just before it becomes unplayable, I rescue it. The way the file becomes corrupted is based on the way it was encoded, so as much as these portraits are study of faces, they are also a study of how we choose to "save our memories" by using Quicktime or AVI. The reason these portraits are long takes of faces is because of the Mayan Legend of the Ceibas tree. More about this can be read on the website, but to be brief, the Mayans believed that when you died, after having a lover in your life - you would wait by this tree (their gate to the afterlife) for your lover to die too, so you wouldn't have to make the journey alone. These faces, now aware of what they're made of, are waiting to see their lovers once more.

Evan is a graduate fellow at the University of Iowa where he studies new media and cinema production. His interests include post-structuralist media theory, break dancing, and beards. His current and ongoing project; the Ceibas Cycle, is an attempt to concretize digital video by re-imagining its hexadecimal code, while at the same time retelling the Mayan elegy of the Ceibas tree.

Ask him about his awesome smoothie recipes.

me@evanmeaney.com
www.evanmeaney.com