POP_Remix @ Camerawork

Hello. I'm writing to announce the opening of POP_Remix, at SF
Camerawork. A description of the show is below. If you are in town,
please stop by our opening, on Tuesday, May 11. It is going to be a
TON of fun–with work made from Starsky & Hutch, Super Mario games,
and Marilyn Monroe films, among other pop sources, this is probably
the most fun I've ever had curating a show!

We are also having a number of fun events, including a hacking
demonstration by Cory Arcangel & Alex Galloway (5/10 in Mountain
View, co-sponsored with Zero1 & Leonardo ISAST) and a screening of
"Enjoy!" and "Value-Added Cinema" (5/18, in the downstairs theatre).
Check here for more details: http://www.sfcamerawork.org/events.html

POP_Remix
May 11-June 12, Opening Reception May 11, 5-8pm
SF Camerawork-1246 Folsom-SF, CA 94103 USA

Cory Arcangel / BEIGE, Matthew Biederman, Anthony Discenza, Radical
Software Group (RSG) featuring Alex Galloway, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy,
Paul Pfeiffer

{{This exhibition is accompanied by an issue of Camerawork: A Journal
of Photographic Arts, featuring essays by Lev Manovich, Philip
Sherburne, Jose Luis de Vicente, and others.}}

The Pop art era of Warhol and Lichtenstein may have officially come
to pass, but the movement has not ended. In today's moving image
culture, the context of Pop art is ripe for reconsideration-a
"remixing" if you willS The creative strategy of appropriation has
only grown, in function and in source-material, since the Television
experiments and video art of the 1960s. Just as Pop artists of that
era lifted logos and vernacular imagery, the work in POP_Remix takes
as its marrow appropriated segments of popular films, TV programs,
and video games. The deconstructed and remixed results serve as
meditations on mainstream image-making and its cultural import.

Anthony Discenza is concerned with the engorgement of our lives by
the images of "mediated culture." His work thus attempts to realize
the decay of the images that work to "decay" our selves. This effort
appears to us in the form of often painterly, abstract, or
kaleidoscopic video (de)constructions. Here he presents portraits of
three "Hosts," the yield of layering footage of seven major network
news anchors.

Paul Pfeiffer explores the visual histories of the film, TV, and
digital/video eras, Pfeiffer's projects often take up issues in (and
parallels among) religion, sports, colonialism, racism, masculinity,
and power. In his photographic series, Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, Pfeiffer has "erased" iconic images of Marilyn Monroe
from film stills, leaving only a hazy vacant landscape.

Through techniques of parody, pastiche, and laborious dissection,
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy explore the enculturating impacts of genre and
narrative structure. For Every Shot, Every Episode, the McCoys
created a database of every shot in every episode of "Starsky and
Hutch." Viewers can choose to play disks categorizing the indexed
data. In How I Learned, the McCoys similarly catalogued episodes from
the show "Kung-Fu," rhetorically asking 'if all you ever knew about
the world you learned from this show, what would you know?'

Matthew Biederman is also engaged in deconstructing TV clips. In his
AleatoryTV, a computer scans a channel of live TV for specific words
via speech recognition algorithms. The words form a sentence,
pre-selected by the artist. As the agent "hears" the words on TV, it
samples the audio and visual content that accompanies it, placing the
clip in a loop that is continuously played back on a large
television. New utterances of the word replace old ones and the
process begins anew each day.

In 2x2 Alex Galloway, founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG)
"degrades" video clips from popular films and TV programs into linear
animations two pixels tall by two pixels wide. The flickering clips
are played on GameBoys. Galloway's Prepared PlayStation 2 uses
unmodified versions of the PlayStation game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4
to exploit "bugs and glitches in the code to create dirty, jolting
game loops." Both projects point to an internal collapse of the
system within which they signify.

In NES Home Movies: 8bit Landscape Studies Cory Arcangel spins a tale
about his youth, traced by those images he grew up staring at, thus
revealing his identity to be, in a sense "photosensitive." They work
effects a reverse of the trajectory of the image's "evolution" from
still to film to video to video game by reverse-engineering his 8-bit
videos into panoramic photographs.His relayering of self-composed
Detroit-style rock or old school raver tunes over remixed clips of
Mario and his environs, in Video Ravings, brings new meaning to the
work it mimes. In defiance to the commercially-driven "evolution" of
machine culture, and in recognition of the formal origin of these
remixes, Arcangel saves the new videos on game cartridges and runs
them on original Nintendos.

In each of these works we can begin to chart the cultural shift from
accessing screen-based photographic images in the forms of cinematic
projections, to television screens, to hand-held screens. With each
shift there have come physical and cultural shifts, among them a
change in the allowed modes of representation and access of these
images. In each case, the machinery of a work of art dictates the
conditions of its production, distribution, and-arguably-its
interpretation. These issues are at the heart of Pop art, alongside
questions about authorship, the status of the multiple, and
interrogations of commodity fetishism.

Overall, the exhibition serves as a meditation on mainstream
image-making and its cultural import. Each project is at once
accessible-even fun!-by virtue of its relationship to pop culture,
while simultaneously revealing the deeper cumulative effects of our
relationship to its content. Ultimately, we are invited to consider
the impacts these popular lens-based genres have had upon the ways in
which we choose to look at the world. -Marisa S. Olson, Curator

SF Camerawork encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore
new directions in photography and related media by fostering creative
forms of expression that push existing boundaries. This year marks
our 30th Anniversary.

We would like to extend special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Arts, Zero: One, Leonardo ISAST, the Hotel Tax Fund of San
Francisco Grants for the Arts, Hosfelt Gallery, Lucasey Mounting
Systems, Steven Blumenkrantz, Jona Frank, Anthony Laurino, and Thomas
Meyer.