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John Zoller, Alphamega 8, 48 x 70 inches, laser light print, at the APG Gallery, Atlanta, GA. Zoller's "Alphamega" series is "non camera based photography" created with fire on photo emulsion and without any digital manipulation--an old school FX approach, although I'm not aware of anyone who did anything quite like this. It's a bit reminiscent of the Joshua White gelatin/food color/Pyrex dish/overhead projector school of psychedelic light show (pre-laser shows) gone all rigorous and formally elegant. The multifaceted Zoller (a New Yorker now living in Fla.) also did the "United States: Color and Learn" painting series I've posted a few examples of. Below: detail of Alphamega 3.
Sally McKay has documentation up of the "Mods & Rockers" show she curated for Digifest 2006 at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (on view through July 9). A few posts back I ran some pics of kids looking at the part of the installation I collaborated on with John Parker. Below are some pics from Sally that give the overall layout of the show. There are 8 "display windows," each with video capability and divided into pairs. Each of the four participating artist teams (consisting of one Mod and one Rocker) was assigned a pair of display windows. Headphones common to each pair of windows played audio from a single sound source. John and I opted to have the videos running independently from each other--both are looping, "steady state," psychedelically flavored digital abstractions (documented earlier here ). The audio (documented here) is a tune we jointly composed, with the idea in mind that it would generally "go" with the videos without being in sync with them-- thematically, as well as with random rhythmic and melodic correspondences the viewer could potentially experience. Our installation seems to work as a stand-alone piece (based on the feedback I've had from Toronto) but it is also a "digital non-site" in that the various stages of it, our experimentation and thought process, frames, fragments, sound bites, false starts, and "tech content," were documented on this blog and John's website. The subject matter one viewer kindly described as "full on digital." This is from our statement:
Rather than have some kind of face-off, or rumble, we are merging sensibilities. The collective inner Mod is the high tech influence in the form of some sophisticated audio software and a newish laptop used to edit and burn the video, and the inner Rocker is the low tech source material: 8-Bit-style tunes on an old Mac (some originally composed in the '80s) and animated GIFs by Tom based on MSPaint versions of Web images of John's work.
We're trying for some sort of parity between the audio and visual material. Pixels and square waves are both medium and subject.
