Rhizome.org Artwork

The Samuel Gray Society

2010-01-29T19:45:18+01:00

This project is inspired, in part, by the increasing level of scholarship and activity in the field of Microhistory, paired with an increasing level of established journalistic bias and partisan scholarship embedded in modern media. While there is no acceptable or inclusive definition, Microhistory can be understood as a relatively new branch in the study of history, common since 1970, that focuses on narrow magnified examinations of specific places, decades, or ethnic groups as opposed to larger, broader studies over time. My strategy utilizes anthropological and archaeological methodology, appropriates common research modalities and presents visual archives to selectively insert particular and eccentric information into a dialogue based on the discrepancies between truth and myth concerning the past and recent present. The Samuel Gray Society project consists of the creation of an educational foundation whose mission is to preserve the people and culture of 18th century colonial America through the life and legacy of Samuel Gray, the first man killed in the Boston Massacre. Currently, I am the founder, president and sole member of this organization. This project involves two significant undertakings. The first is the creation of the Sam Gray Society website, (www.samgraysociety.org) which is currently underway. The second is the creation of artifacts housed in the SGS visual archives. The archives, which are the most significant educational contribution of the SGS, are comprised of four fields of research: 1. Material culture of the 18th century 2. Technology of the 18th century 3. The SGS Scrimshaw collection 4. The SGS paper collection The process I employ produces objects that have very specific references to the past by incorporating traditional techniques, but remain visibly awkward or identifable as imposters, causing the attentive viewer to question their juxtaposition. These objects are then broken, disfigured or buried to facilitate an aging process. Subsequently, I reclaim them in situ, conserve and archive them, ultimately presenting fictitious antiquities that examine authenticity under the umbrella of scholarship. They are presented in a respectful, encyclopedic manner that supports thoughtful questions regarding contemporary cultural or historical analysis. Almost nothing is known about the life of Samuel Gray, and like a poet or playwright, I intend to insert my narrative where none currently exists. In this way, history is what I make of it--a ripe mixture of historical fact and tenuous hypothesis.

Let's Make Sure Everything Is A Thing.com

2010-01-29T19:40:21+01:00

Thin, clear domes form the boundaries of an iconic starscape, silently inviting the user to manipulate a containing and categorizing structure within an endless cosmic flow.

Heard an Experimenta Commission by Rhys Turner & Melissa Ramos

2010-01-22T20:51:19+01:00

Heard is an interactive artwork exploring cultural and social views through sophisticated tracking technology in virtual as well as physical space. This work explores ideas around online social networking environments and how the proliferation of these spaces effect the way by which people relate and interact with one another. The artwork invites audiences to wear a wireless digital headpiece and ‘become’ one of the characters they see on screen. They then physically explore the installation space as well as a virtual environment, which is projected onto the wall in front of them. As they walk around the space, they listen to the musings of the character they have chosen to ‘become’: a little girl, an elderly lady or a young doctor. These characters (through a pre-recorded script created by writers each assuming one of the characters) reflect upon their ideals, values, hopes and dreams. The whimsical exchange between characters is based on everyday moments and activities. When there is more than one person in the space, a conversation between characters is triggered when people approach one another. This conversation can be heard through the headpieces as well as seen in text that appears on the projected screen. Brood Box 8 Rankins Lane Melbourne / off lt Bourke Street between Queen + Elizabeth Street Mobile 0412 495 899 / info@broodbox.com.au Open / Monday to Saturday 7am-5pm / Closed Sundays all other times by appointment only Fri 12/02/2010 - Opening Night from 6pm Sat 13/02/2010 - Gallery Open Sun 14/02/2010 - Gallery Closed Mon 15/02/2010 - Gallery Open Tue 16/02/2010 - Gallery Open www.broodbox.com.au

ThingPit

2010-01-08T20:11:53+01:00

ThingPit \’th`ing\ p`1t\ Noun An entity, an idea, or a quality perceived, known, or thought to have its own existence. a. The real or concrete substance of an entity. b. A natural or artificial hole or cavity in the ground. c. A natural hollow or depression in the body or an organ. d. The single central kernel or stone of certain fruits Verb (often foll. by against)to match in opposition, esp. as antagonists: a. a concealed danger or difficulty b. guerilla projection made in opposition to a static view of our surroundings c. a re-presentation of a coming together / an envirotron of differentiation d. the commonly overlooked exultation in between ORIGIN Old English (also in the senses “meeting” and “matter, concern”)

check: Under heaven 02

2010-01-08T20:00:30+01:00

under Heaven 02 A "fata morgana" under a viaduct in Amsterdam. complete with palmtrees, bananatrees and a waterfall. The viaduct under the A10 highway between Bos & Lommer and Geuzenveld houses a space of more than 2500 square meters. A strong fence is placed around the whole area. For the next 5 years artist Leonard van Munster [1972] will use this abandoned space as his exhibition area and will make the passer-by part of a dynamic public artwork.

Deus Digitalis

2010-01-08T19:48:09+01:00

Jean Delouvroy and Hans Verhaegen started there collaboration with the audiovisual installation ‘Deus Digitalis’ (2009). Deus Digitalis' was integrated in the characteristic context of the Orpheus Institute's concert hall (Gent, Belgium). The basic elements consist of computer-steered animation of the recognizable distinctive human pattern by Hans Verhaegen and the inventive composed sound layers by Jean Delouvroy.

Ballentine (OpenLayers API applied)

2009-12-18T20:57:24+01:00

Ballentine the bird is a digital drawing about 20,000 pixels tall and 30,000 pixels wide (roughly 20x30 feet @72ppi). She was drawn using one-pixel wide scribble lines colored red, yellow, blue, white, and black. Because she is so big, I've used the OpenLayers mapping API (similar to Google Maps) to allow zoom and scrolling features. The concept behind the drawing is based on the idea that digital images can be infinite in size. Drawing her entirely of one-pixel wide lines (labor-intensive) is an attempt on my part to undermine the idea that drawing on the computer is merely a shortcut. She was drawn in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.

The Marfa Ring

2009-12-11T23:59:49+01:00

The Marfa Ring project is an experiment in colonizing the virtual geography of the small town of Marfa, Texas by creating a "Web Ring" of sites about it. Due to the Ring's interlinking, Google search results are skewed in favor of our sites (which vary in levels of veracity and intent) as opposed to Marfa's legitimate web presence. Because of the extensive work "remodeling" Marfa's online, visitors' interactions with Marfa are ostensibly colored by their web-based preconceptions, as engineered by us. The project is a digital homage to Donald Judd.

Artistic License

2009-12-11T23:55:34+01:00

Produce your own customized Artistic License in a matter of minutes using your web browser. Instead of biometrics and radio frequency ID chips, Artistic License embraces freedom, collaboration, sharing, and imagination as keys to a more appealing modernity. Your Artistic License doesn't require you to look like yourself, and it does not impose factual restrictions. Nonetheless it has the truthiness coveted by authority. /// Artistic License was conceived primarily as a form of net.art that is experienced by people around the world through their browsers. During some exhibition events, however, it is possible to produce laminated licenses directly in the gallery space, as occurred in September 2009 in Hartford, Connecticut. /// Although in many respects it's fun, Artistic License encourages card-holders to swipe across the borders of technology and identity. The greater socio-political context for this work includes privacy and personal liberty issues. Emerging identification technologies like biometrics, RFID transmitters, facial recognition software, GPS devices, microvideo, and nanotechnology have already disrupted basic life ways. The continuing changes have affected freedom of behavior and identity, constraining the imagination in the name of a security that is never truly achieved. Artistic License entertains the possibility that imagination, rather than restriction and control, is the key to avoiding the dystopian misadventures that are coming into focus. /// While interactive art has been online for decades, basic assumptions about the division of labor between the artist and the spectator haven't changed substantially. Artistic License targets this issue ironically, using the co-creation of ID cards - artistic licenses - as the engine for an open-ended series. The results are somewhat unpredictable. The various contributions are performative, rebellious, naive, sophisticated, vulgar, etc. What distinguishes one license from the next is a matter of personal choice. So spectators, take advantage of your new empowerment: apply artistic license by "departing from convention or from factual accuracy ... to achieve a desired effect." Choose from among these rationales for participation or invent your own: * Leverage artifice to offset erosion of freedoms. // * Recoup time honored forms of play. // * Engage the joy of distortion, omission and irony. // * Gain free admission to arts friendly establishments. // * Incite the envy and respect of some peers. // * Contribute to expansion of the creative commons. // * Exploit offer for a free product.

Open House

2009-11-20T17:15:55+01:00

Conceived and produced by Michael Smith and Joshua White in 1998-1999. All videotapes and artworks in the exhibition were created specifically for this site-specific installation piece.

Space Chillers

2009-11-20T16:49:19+01:00

Help the Chiller make his way through the confusion of cyberspace safely - play Space Chillers on any website you wish! The postmodernist universe is the universe of naive trust in the screen which makes the very quest for 'what lies behind it' irrelevant. 'To take things at their interface value' involves a phenomenological attitude, an attitude of 'trusting the phenomena'. More and more, we perceive only color and outline, no longer depth and volume. without a blind spot in the field of vision, without this elusive point from which the object returns the gaze, we no longer 'see something'; the field of vision is reduced to a flat surface, and 'reality' itself is perceived as a visual hallucination. Ted: [clears his throat, to Socrates] "All we are is dust in the wind," dude. [Socrates gives them a blank stare] Bill: [scoops up a pile of dust from the basin before them and lets it run out of his hand] Dust. [he blows the remainder away] Bill: Wind. Ted: [points at Socrates] Dude. [Socrates gasps]

The Ghost of Vannevar Bush Hacked My Server

2009-11-06T18:43:36+01:00

The ghost of Vannevar Bush hacked my server. He appears randomly, rendered as HTML text.

dis.like()

2009-10-27T00:06:34+01:00

why can we only "like" something on facebook? do you dis.like something? simply copy and paste the URL "http://dis-like.com" into a facebook comment window and post.

Buy & Sell Time (from Silicon Valley)

2009-10-26T23:33:30+01:00

BUY & SELL TIME (from Silicon Valley) Hamilton Ave , San Jose, CA. September 2009. Service of buying and selling time offered by eBay. Time Notes presents its time credit line. If you had one minute, one hour, one extra year in your life: what would you do with it? Place your bid for the time that you need and tell us how would you spend it. The Time Notes Bank will take receipt of those desires that you could not concrete due to a lack of time or because you wasted it in things that you did not wanted. Then, if you win, we will send you a time note of the corresponding value in time with your relegated desire printed on it. For examples of how will use the time other users see the Given Time Data Base: http://www.timenoteshouse.org/index-ENG.html

ThankyouAndyWarhol.com

2009-10-26T23:28:59+01:00

http://thankyouandywarhol.com, 2007

Man With A Movie Camera:the Global Remake

2009-10-26T23:06:47+01:00

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, upload them to http://dziga.perrybard.net where software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. As people can upload the same shot more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. The work explores the capabilities of the internet to achieve global collaboration by encouraging culturally diverse participation and by developing software which accepts input from many sources (e.g. mobile phone, digital still camera, video, screen-grab) allowing for the greatest range of participation. To ensure that uploads would not be from the usual places 12 foreign correspondents were commissioned (Brazil, Lebanon, Israel, Columbia, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, Japan, China, Korea, Mexico,Thailand) whose role is to spread the word through their mailing lists and to organize the upload of scenes or shots that add up to a minimum of one minute in length. Man With A Movie Camera was selected because of Vertov’s intentions as a filmmaker to document daily activities. The film itself is a database of shots. Although it is structured around a day from sunrise to sunset that day is synthesized using footage from three different cities and interrupted by a second narrative which is the diary in the life of a cameraman (a worker). It is edited in anything but a linear fashion using techniques as sophisticated as today’s video editing softwares. There are no shots longer than 22 seconds making it very contemporary in rhythm. The intention of the project is to orchestrate a fluid work that invites participation, that continues to grow after it is launched, and that results in a database of personal perspectives where evidence of politics and history is filtered through the lens of individual rather than state philosophies– in Vertov’s terms “the decoding of life as it is”. It is intended for the web, for screening in public space, theatres, film festivals, museums, galleries. In creating the database version Vertov’s experiment enters the 21st century. Its original form and content pose interesting questions about the nature of documentary that are still relevant almost a century later. Project History One of my persistent concerns is the question of access, the digital divide, who is included, who is left out. I am particularly interested in public space as a venue. In 2000 I set up a screen in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal Building in New York to present The Terminal Salon, a portrait of the community done in collaboration with local residents who shot all the video. I considered that a local channel. When we were testing the projection passersby asked how they could be on the screen and I had no way to do that. While I was working on The Terminal Salon I was invited to participate in VideoArchaeology in Sofia. I decided to reshoot four minutes of Man With A Movie Camera in collaboration with a Bulgarian artist, Boyan Dobrev, who wanted to learn about video. Sofia in 1999 was in a transition and I thought the parallel could be interesting.The footage we shot as very much a copy of the original leading me to question the possibilities of the remake. Putting those two experiences together led to my current project Man With a Movie Camera:The Global Remake.

Tweeting Colors

2009-10-26T22:55:13+01:00

"Tweeting Colors" is webpage comprised of vertical color bars created by special tweets from Twitter users. Anyone can view the piece, but a Twitter user in the public timeline can add bars by following the simple directions linked to from the bottom of the page. The newest bars appear from the left. The page auto-refreshes a few times a minute, so sit back and enjoy the Color Feed. Thanks to Donovan Buck for the provided scripting. Created as part of a virtual residency with Glasstire.com.

The Image Mill: Sustainable Cinema #1

2009-10-26T22:48:14+01:00

The Image Mill is a public sculpture that uses the force and beauty of falling water as the energy to create a moving picture. The artwork merges an optical illusion that led to the invention of movies with one of the first power sources. By referencing the histories of cinema and industrialization, The Image Mill explores a possible future of environmentally responsible media—looking forward by looking back. One of the first movies created was a galloping horse and this piece also uses it as a metaphor for the region’s auto industry. The ‘horsepower’ that drove the Michigan industrial age is at a transition to a new age of alternative energy…the pony stumbles, but continues on. This theme was also revealed in the fabrication. Made by Michigan metal workers, the artwork proves that the skills of industrial-era tradesmen can be tapped as a valuable resource as the region considers new sustainable directions.

Repent

2009-10-26T22:39:13+01:00

This is from a series of videogames simulating religious verbs.

Analog Environments by Mitch Trale, 2009

2009-10-19T16:37:43+01:00

Analog Environments by Mitch Trale is a web project that is part of the ongoing on-line exhibition Serial Chillers in Paradise curated by jstchillin (Caitlin Denny & Parker Ito). The following text is a responsive essay to and part of Analog Environments... i. Already Alongside. You are presented with an object of strength and you are suddenly falling amongst others. Your solitude has been disrupted and structure is no longer 'yours.' But you've always been falling you realize, only now you can feel the wind. A bush rustles; it's your coping. Practical activity stays so, it is absorbed by the object until you reflect on it. ii. Losing Oneself. I can no longer tell myself apart from others. My eventual techno-transcendence is all that keeps me going. Idle, detached, just looking into the void as it not only stares back at me but beyond me. My familiarity with the object, cyber-spatiality, is a familiarity with a world I become lost in. iii. Nothing. The one catches up with the several and chills - a pure beholding, a nihilistic pleasure. The hallucinatory search through the scraps and opacities results in a distance from themselves. An approximation had been made, but 'near' and 'far' have been defeated by 'here.' Reality hackers stumble over their own tangled wires. The spectacle of the many, this web, is spontaneously experienced as 'here' while the spectacles on my face remain nothing more than nearby. -Caitlin Denny

Untitled (plate tectonics)

2009-09-24T17:00:39+01:00

Untitled (plate tectonics) is a sound installation consisting of a series of phonograph records which play the sounds of exhibition spaces in New York City. Visitors are encouraged to then play these recordings on multiple turntables in the exhibition space, creating a new composite environment from the overlay of room noise. / / / / / Description by Carson Chan, co-director, PROGRAM Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations: By installing excavated stones from New Jersey in a gallery, Robert Smithson, in the late 1960s, revealed the dialectic between abstract and actual locations. Sometimes in containers, sometimes piled, the stones in the gallery represented a far away location without resembling it. Something of New Jersey, Smithson maintained, was held in those rocks and their displacement resulted in the expansion of the original site, both physically and conceptually. The Site Non-Site dialectic, as Smithson called it, feels particularly familiar today as our daily lives are continually reshaped by place-defying technologies in communication, information and travel. With Untitled (plate tectonics), Andy Graydon similarly explores the physical dimensions of location in contrast to its perception. After obtaining the ambient sounds of eleven “natural” art locations in New York – museums, fairs, galleries – Graydon cut the recordings onto unique acetate phonograph records, dubplates, that allow visitors to reshape PROGRAM’s gallery space with sound. Environment is used as a material. Replaying the sounds of these New York institutions as they intermix with the ambient sounds of PROGRAM, space is at once extended and collapsed. Dubplates, for the music industry, are used in mastering studios before the final master. They are meant for temporary use, they deteriorate over time. The sounds recorded on their surface begin to dissolve after about fifty plays. / / / / / Artist's statement: What is a visitor to the Met doing when she views the Greek sculpture garden almost exclusively through the LCD panel of her camera? What kind of experience is being produced? It is a familiar lament that our culture is losing its ability to attend, to look with engagement at art and at everyday experience. But that lament overlooks a compeling fact: the visitor is composing. In those photos, sounds, or videos, the art and the surrounding space are collapsed together (i.e. onto a picture plane) and rendered plastic, malleable, in a sense modular. Most importantly they are incorporated into the world of the viewer, rather than the reverse. In this sense there are few more democratic gestures in an exhibition than to point a device and make a recording, not to preserve a record of the place, but to impose upon it a unique continuity, a contour of one's own experience; to sculpt with it. A museum or exhibition space aims to present a coherent itinerary of (largely visual) experience. Sound tends to tell a different story, revealing places and intervals that are disruptive, distracted, intense, or diffuse, but rarely discrete. Indeed, sound abhors discretion. It can only exist through disruption and agitation. Sound is inclusive and immersive: if you hear it, it is vibrating you. This helps to explain the conflicted relationship contemporary art exhibition has had with sound work, in which playing pieces on headphones has become the favored way of taming sound into an ideally discrete sound-object. With this in mind, Untitled (plate tectonics) works with the exhibition space (both recorded and present) not as a resolved environment for the reception and contemplation of works, but rather as both an impulse (as in electrical energy) and as a material, a moldable substance useful in the creation of other ideas, further experiences, alternate places.

Time Spent Alone

2009-08-19T22:23:34+01:00

Time spent alone is a series of projects conceptually linked through their being conceived in solitude and intended for display in the isolated social space of the internet. They are daydreams, worries and solitary trips. As a website, the state of Time Spent Alone is never fixed. It grows as viewers contribute to the Destinations section, and as I find new ideas to add to it.

Invisible Paintings

2009-08-19T22:22:21+01:00

I made a machine inspired of the texts by Oyvind Fahlstrom. He wrote about the future of art and how we could use technology to create art. The art piece is about how we could reproduce paintings with help of technology. The machine creates pictures and you pay a small amount and with help of different buttons you print your picture. The machine is made of old found thrash like skateboard wheels, furniture old electronics. Yesterday’s ideas of the future becomes real.

Hommage a Baertling

2009-08-19T22:21:11+01:00

The art-piece is a computer program that creates and recreates pictures of the Swedish artist Olle Baertling. Olle Bærtling (1911-81) is one of the few Nordic artists of the second half of the 20th century who made a name for himself internationally. Initially inspired by the Concretists, he developed a style of his own with bright colors in triangular shapes, which, in his later works, appear to move out of the frames into the infinity of space, which has become the distinguishing characteristic of Bærtling. I have been writing a computer program that creates new pictures that tries to recreate the work of Baertling. The code uses randomness to make every picture unique and different based on the work of Baertling. The program works fast and creates hundreds of pictures a minute and store them in PDF format that archives in a database. After some hours the program has created a million pictures and they are all are different from each other. The program is visual and you see the process when the program creates pictures in a pulsating and rapid move. It could be seen as the art worlds Deep Blue, the computer that won against the world champion in chess, Kasparov. The art piece is a comment on a society where productivity, effectiveness and profitability is keywords and where people get replaced by computers at work. How will the computerized world affect art? Will painting be replaced by code or computer or just be a tool for creating? This art piece could be seen as a humoristic comment, but it also raises questions that we need to ask ourselves when our world is chaining and people live their life’s in front of computer screens. The art piece could also be seen as a big experiment where I try to find the perfect picture in a database of millions of pictures. In the context of millions of pictures and the fact that a computer created the work the art pieces seems to get empty and pointless like something is missing.. The projects was also made into an artistbook.

Misplaced Reliquary

2009-08-19T22:19:59+01:00

Commissioned in 2004 by Rhizome.org, Misplaced Reliquary is a handheld curiosity cabinet containing the holy relics collected by an eccentric curator. The relics are contained within a virtual repository taking the form of a gameboy advance ROM that can be "played" online and/or downloaded to any gameboy advance (with the correct transfer hardware). An artist's edition of five game cartridges has also been created. About this work Rhizome.org announced a call for commission proposals to examine the nature of “game” art in 2004. In response to that call, I offered that I would be interested in examining the meaning of game as it relates to the hunt. Thus, I spent my time in the field, walking off-trail looking, searching, hunting for lost bits of bone, fragments of fur and other forgotten animal relics which are incorporated within this piece that exists both online and as a physical installation. The relics are contained within a virtual reliquary taking the form of a computer file native to game cartridges for Gameboy Advance (GBA) that can be viewed online within a browser window or downloaded to any actual GBA hardware. In this way, the relics can be viewed online or taken away by anyone who would like to download them, although to view them offline requires a GBA or GBA software emulator. Accompanying the relics are the field notes of the curator of the reliquary that also exist within the context of a web page. In addition to the online aspects of this work, a physical installation also exists consisting of a GBA with the reliquary preloaded onto it as well as a leather-bound book containing the field notes of the curator of the reliquary. This book is composed of handset, letter pressed type on Rives lightweight book paper; it is case bound and the book block is covered in soft calfskin leather. Viewers are allowed to peruse both the book and the GBA freely – as the book and the interface of the GBA are inviting and familiar, viewers tend to inherently gravitate toward examining both.

papergame

2009-08-19T22:18:20+01:00

Papergame is a new computergame experience with anachronistic hardware. This game uses a dot matrix printer as graphical output, that means the algorithm draws the gamescenario directly onto the paper. The developer selected the scrolling game genre to show the users the real process of one of the important game genres. The developer intention on these project is to transform the game structure from the digital environment into the physical world. Instead of creating an illusionistic scene, papergame shows the technical reality frame by frame or even page by page. The low velocity of the gameplay encourages the user to reflect the gameconcepts and the inherently structures.

Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter

2009-08-13T22:38:07+01:00

"Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter" is a real-time chart of postings from people I follow on Twitter. I have manually reduced the individual avatars of those I follow to a single, representative color, and each block shown represents an individual tweet that has come through my Twitter feed. The resulting grid is being generated in real-time, with the top-left square representing the most recent post. The remaining squares are presented left-to-right, top-down in reverse chronological order. A viewer can actively change the composition of the grid by simply changing the size of the browser window. Rows and columns can be added or removed, causing the individual squares to shift and/or wrap, thus creating a new composition. While the actual content of the tweet is not shown, the author, time, and date of the post can be viewed by placing your cursor over any given square. This piece was always conceptualized to be a color grid, but it wasn’t until I started Photoshopping mockups that I thought of Ellsworth Kelly and, specifically, his grid pieces (such as "Colors for a Large Wall"). The visual aesthetic is certainly similar, but the nature of how the two grids are arranged couldn’t be more different. Kelly’s color square pieces are arranged in an arbitrary sequence, whereas this piece is a direct chronological representation of my Twitter feed. While unpredictable, it is certainly not arbitrary. So, as a title, "Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter" only holds up on a visual level and not a conceptual one. Thanks to Donovan Buck for the provided scripting. Created as part of a virtual residency with Glasstire.com.

Torrent Raiders

2009-08-12T23:07:46+01:00

TSA Communications

2009-08-12T20:00:17+01:00

TSA Communication is a project that alters the airport security experience, inviting the government to learn more about passengers than just the contents of their carry on bags. Messages are cut into thin 8.5" x 11" sheets of stainless steel designed to comfortably fit inside airline carry on baggage. During the x-ray screening process, the technology normally designed to view the contents of a traveler's baggage is transformed into a communication tool for displaying messages aimed at airport security. The content of the plates varies from flight to flight, but includes "NOTHING TO SEE HERE", an image of the American flag and the TSA's (Transportation Security Agency's) mission statement as listed on its website, "I AM THE FRONTLINE OF DEFENSE, DRAWING ON MY IMAGINATION TO CREATIVELY PROTECT AMERICA FROM HARM".

The project stems from the artist's interest in changing his role in the dance of airport security from a passive participant to an active one. Traveling with the plates has become a normal part of the artist's travel habits and he has taken the plates through airport security checkpoints over 20 times in China, the United States, France, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Italy, and Austria. Interactions with airport security are recorded with a hidden video camera. The main intention of the project is not to antagonize airport security, but rather to create a situation which seeds discourse related to personal freedoms, freedom of speech and the role of security.

TSA Communication also attempts to inject conversations related to personal freedoms into the larger context of online popular culture. Humor and a polished design aesthetic are elements employed by the artist as a means towards reaching a wider online audience than just those interested in art and activism. While one portion of the project revolves around the interaction of the artist and the security agent, another critical element involves the interaction between the online documentation and the reaction of the audience on the web. TSA Communication has received hundreds of comments on top 100 blogs such as BoingBoing, Gizmodo, MAKE, Kottke and even the blog of celebrity rapper Kanye West.

Online discussions surrounding the project have reached as far as the Transportation Security Administration's own web blog, titled The Evolution of Security. This blog thread received 195 comments, primarily from security workers, making it one of the most discussed posts on the TSA's website. While the hidden video camera records airline security agents reactions to the project in the real world, comments on the TSA website record agents' reactions in an online (and semi-anonymous) environment.

TSA Communication is ongoing research, activism, and performance that aims to give citizens an active voice in the theater of security.

White Glove Tracking

2009-08-12T19:59:43+01:00