Anthony Discenza: Host

Anthony Discenza, Host, digital video, continuous loop projection, 72 in high, 2004.

© Anthony Discenza

From television, movies and the Internet, to an endless sea of magazines and other print media, we find ourselves exposed to ever-greater amounts of visual stimuli. Each day, a steady stream of highly mediated imagery assaults us, producing a profound level of alienation as the logic of the spectacle colonizes our own internal narratives.

As a visual artist complicit in the production and consumption of images, I find this situation both fascinating and deeply problematic. I am particularly concerned with the violence implicit in our media overexposure, a violence not based in specific images or content but rather in the dissociative effects produced by the speed, quantity and extreme disparity of the imagery we consume. My work attempts to expose this violence while acknowledging its seductive force (see also Color Plate C No. 1).

I work mainly with visual material appropriated from commercial film and television. Using re-recording, compression and signal degradation to break down the original information, I look for ways to collapse media imagery into itself, to arrest it within a moment of simultaneous destruction and reification. Through this collapse, I am trying to uncover layers of meaning not apparent in the original context. At the same time, I am interested in revealing the world of images around us as a very "real" space—one that shapes our worldview in all sorts of potent but invisible ways.