Artists and Things I Have Been Looking at Part 2

1. Marlo Pascual 

"In the act of producing a picture there is always a form of “construction” going on. Whether it’s the framing, the lighting, or the positioning of the subject. As time passes, we have a better understanding of these constructions, and their successes and failures become more evident.

As social interactions take place more and more with the screen and the virtual, I find that there is a desire for physical interactions and I play with the possibilities and limitations of those interactions."

- Marlo Pascual

2. John Divola

"The psychiatrist and theorist Carl Jung speculated that human beings have a biological propensity to form certain mythic structures that he called archetypes. In his personal writing he describes the existence of a collective human consciousness. Rather than Jung's idea of a psychic inheritance, a collective unconscious may be something that humanity is in the process of implementing. While one might suggest language itself is the beginning of collective identity, contemporary visual culture shifted the abstraction of language to a realm of shared experiential specificity.

We have extended the externalization of memory in the form of digital databases and we have interwoven representational experience with direct experience to a degree where we can no longer distinguish the basis for our conceptions of reality. Furthermore, there no longer appears to be much individual appetite for interrogating the difference. When I think about Manhattan, and I have been there many times, I cannot clearly identify the source of my conceptions. These conceptions are based in direct expe rience, Manhattan as background in TV detective fictions, or numerous other representational sources. It never really occurs to me that I should make a distinction as to the sources on which I base this image of place. Whether from direct experience of the world or direct experience of the physical evidence that constitutes photographic representation, visual experience and memory gradually focus these impressions on a condition of equivalence. Memories of my actual experiences with any particular city must compete with a relentless stream of representations of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Memories of walks in nature are intermixed with that familiar stretch of desert highway that I see continually repeated in automotive commercials."

-John Divola

3. Zilvinas Kempinas

Tube, 2009.  Magnetic tape, plywood.  Installation view, Lithuanian Pavilion, 53d Venice Biennale, June-November, 2009

White Noise, 2007. Horizontally stretched lines of video tape, electric fans

Simple and quietly mesmerizing, Zilvinas Kempinas' screen of "white noise" was one of the superstar of the shows. Seen from afar, the screen vibrates and sounds like the fragmented black and white pixels of an untuned video source. As they move forward, visitors realize that the screen is an opening into the wall stretched with horizontal lines of videotape vibrating in the currents of air created by fans. Unlike a magic trick which looses its spell as soon as the artifice behind it is revealed, White Noise gets more fascinating the closer you get to understanding it.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/04/one-of-the-major-downsides.php


4. Semiconductor 




Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo

"Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Black Rain is sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO. Here we see the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME's (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth. Data courtesy of courtesy of the Heliospheric Imager on the NASA STEREO mission.

Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME's, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by.

As in Semiconductors previous work 'Brilliant Noise' which looked into the sun, they work with raw scientific satellite data which has not yet been cleaned and processed for public consumption. By embracing the artefacts, calibration and phenomena of the capturing process we are reminded of the presence of the human observer who endeavors to extend our perceptions and knowledge through technological innovation.

Black Rain installation from Semiconductor on Vimeo.