Jonathan Horowitz looms large in the "art as mediacrit" field. He currently shows with Gavin Brown gallery, and has been an influential force on the New York scene since the early '90s. Although he now uses the Internet as a tool and playing field, his work came to prominence during the VCR era. In his piece Maxell, a tape made in 1990 and projected on a large scale at Greene Naftali gallery in 1998, a black screen with the single word MAXELL has been dubbed and redubbed on a VCR so that it gets progressively grainier. But it isn't just degrading--random visual and audial noise is being picked up and amplified with each copy that begins to aggressively overwhelm the original source, in a way that is almost performative. When projected on a large screen, ugly violent electronic sounds and wrenching, spasmodic lightning zaps build dramatically, so that by the end of the tape the video becomes assaultive, almost scary in its sense of total abject breakdown. The piece shows the unintended consequences of mechanical reproduction, data transmission that is supposed to be seamless taken to its most extreme conclusion, so that it actually feels toxic. In other words, Art reveals a dark side to technology that has been there all along. The ultimate irony is the use of MAXELL as subject matter, a brand built on clarity and trust.
That's awesome! I wish I could actually see the video.
Seems connected to the much earlier discussion on finding similar surprise artifacts when pushing the digital sound envelope.
I loved his Hollywood credit roll piece he screened at printed matter.
I've seen Maxell on a regular TV and it's great. But when he showed it at Carol Greene's it was a projected large, by itself in a room, and it had an even more powerful impact.
Lots of people have worked with this idea of infinite recursive, degenerative copying--it's been done with tape recording, xerography and lately Cory Arcangel did it with digital compression.
I prefer Maxell because of the use of the logo--so cool and ironic--coupled with the audiovisual assault of the presentation. It's the most punk by far.
Just remembered that Arcangel did a piece not long ago (with RSG) on the theme of compression called TAC, or Total Asshole Compression. It's not really related to the idea of degeneration through multiple copying, but it did have attitude. To quote coin-operated: "Drag and drop a file into TAC and it will make your file exponentially BIGGER than what it used to be." I dropped a 15k HTML file in there and it compressed (expanded) to 7.2 MB! The project emphasizes the fact that with hard drives and memory getting so cheap and expansive in space, that compression formats might not be needed in the future! Why not just expand instead of trying to make everything so small! Hasn’t the advent of broadband made us realize this yet? Anyways, TAC only runs on MAC OSX currently and I wouldn’t advise dropping a DIVX movie into the compressor or you might end up crashing your machine… wait a minute, I think I just discovered the point of this project."
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Jonathan Horowitz looms large in the "art as mediacrit" field. He currently shows with Gavin Brown gallery, and has been an influential force on the New York scene since the early '90s. Although he now uses the Internet as a tool and playing field, his work came to prominence during the VCR era. In his piece Maxell, a tape made in 1990 and projected on a large scale at Greene Naftali gallery in 1998, a black screen with the single word MAXELL has been dubbed and redubbed on a VCR so that it gets progressively grainier. But it isn't just degrading--random visual and audial noise is being picked up and amplified with each copy that begins to aggressively overwhelm the original source, in a way that is almost performative. When projected on a large screen, ugly violent electronic sounds and wrenching, spasmodic lightning zaps build dramatically, so that by the end of the tape the video becomes assaultive, almost scary in its sense of total abject breakdown. The piece shows the unintended consequences of mechanical reproduction, data transmission that is supposed to be seamless taken to its most extreme conclusion, so that it actually feels toxic. In other words, Art reveals a dark side to technology that has been there all along. The ultimate irony is the use of MAXELL as subject matter, a brand built on clarity and trust.
- tom moody 11-01-2006 8:00 pm
That's awesome! I wish I could actually see the video.
Seems connected to the much earlier discussion on finding similar surprise artifacts when pushing the digital sound envelope.
- j (guest) 11-01-2006 8:30 pm
I loved his Hollywood credit roll piece he screened at printed matter.
- steve 11-02-2006 6:38 am
I've seen Maxell on a regular TV and it's great. But when he showed it at Carol Greene's it was a projected large, by itself in a room, and it had an even more powerful impact.
Lots of people have worked with this idea of infinite recursive, degenerative copying--it's been done with tape recording, xerography and lately Cory Arcangel did it with digital compression.
I prefer Maxell because of the use of the logo--so cool and ironic--coupled with the audiovisual assault of the presentation. It's the most punk by far.
- tom moody 11-04-2006 9:47 am
Just remembered that Arcangel did a piece not long ago (with RSG) on the theme of compression called TAC, or Total Asshole Compression. It's not really related to the idea of degeneration through multiple copying, but it did have attitude. To quote coin-operated: "Drag and drop a file into TAC and it will make your file exponentially BIGGER than what it used to be." I dropped a 15k HTML file in there and it compressed (expanded) to 7.2 MB! The project emphasizes the fact that with hard drives and memory getting so cheap and expansive in space, that compression formats might not be needed in the future! Why not just expand instead of trying to make everything so small! Hasn’t the advent of broadband made us realize this yet? Anyways, TAC only runs on MAC OSX currently and I wouldn’t advise dropping a DIVX movie into the compressor or you might end up crashing your machine… wait a minute, I think I just discovered the point of this project."
- tom moody 11-05-2006 4:24 pm