This exhibition was a solo show in 2019 at the Antecámara de Proyectos exhibition space in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.
Curated by Victoria Vinamaragui, and opening on September 12, 2019, the three video artworks in this exhibition are both generative works from code-driven animations, and glitched videos produced using databending and datamoshing methods to break the video codecs. In both cases, there are random elements and chance events that appear in the artworks – a kind of controlled chaos.
Video can be an immersive experience that pulls you in to the window of the screen, but if you see glitches and errors in the video codec, it pushes you out of that immersive window and you see the ‘raw material’ of digital video. I like to see what happens when the systems and structures we trust and expect to behave in a certain way, break down and show us something else, unexpected.
The Momentum series is a series of code-driven, generative animations which contains an assemblage (or synthesis) of digital media elements that play continuously. The theme of the series is perception of time and reality – video is a medium that is well suited to play and experiment with concepts of space-time and movement.
The animation displays multiple video objects controlled by coded scripts that play the content with different random properties so the animation plays a little differently each time it is launched, and can play its object-oriented loops endlessly. The animation contains the following elements:
A shadowy figure in a landscape is trapped in time and space – forever moving back and forth, sometimes a ghosting of the scene is present suggesting multiple realities.
The scene is interrupted by glitches – accidents in the video encoding and transmission process – disrupting one reality with another, broken one.
The synthesis of two clashing video sequences disquiets and makes us aware of the medium of video itself and the breakdown of encodings and decodings. The glitches have their own colourful and complex aesthetic and they move at a different velocity to the figure in the landscape.
