Bathysphere, 1998

Fired, 1998 Greg Boo^ell digital photo In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Utopian technocrats and managers promised shorter work days and greater leisure time. They argued that technological progress spurred increases in worker productivity, which in turn promised more leisure time. Of course, this never occurred. On the contrary, technological improvements have been leveraged against workers in a number of ways. For example, technology has commonly been used for surveillance (in the form of videocameras, email monitoring, keystroke measurements, and the like) as well as to induce fear of being replaced by a machine. While the Utopian prospects of technocrats are always short-lived, the quixotic sheen of technology has survived. It endures as a modern fantasy. In large part, the goal of my work is to reassociate fantasy and material expe­ rience. Fired was created to parody the mindless optimism projected by Wired magazine, which often obfuscates the actual conditions resulting from tech­ nological progress. It is from a series of proposed postage stamps commemorating "Progress and Technology," the purpose of which is to expose the myth of technological utopianism and the underlying state and corporate interests supported by this myth. I think digital photography is an appropriate medium for this critique because the of the verity ascribed to the photograph in our culture. The use of photomontage to undermine the apparent truthfulness of photographic images is almost as old as the of the t itfiiiff1 ci fl n Ü ■ ■ ■ B U l i ■fflr^■ ■ ■ ■ if™' It i l l i l l HsLJtlP ifsw W S i «R^JK SL^B w J i M L iäS; I m m tap i» W ■ ^Mr Urt» **w '■"^ E1*0110UN iiyp IMP n w IMP i n history of photography. In addition, the software and hardware used to create these images is identical to that used by the public relations and advertising indus­ tries to pitch products and propagate procorporate mythologies. Bathysphere, 1998 Shin Ping Chen video/computer animation M I usical work is a sort of subde language by whose means composers express their state of mind or, to put it another way, their internal dynamic. The fundamental element in my animation Bathysphere is dynamic visual form, which plays a role analogous to that of sound in music. This element is expressed three ways: as rhythm (the movement and transition in lighting and dynamic objects); color (lighting, tex­ ture, and reflection); and visual abstraction (the objects and meir geometry). I am very interested in surrealist landscapes, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape seeks an extreme, any extreme: beauty, structure or the lack of structure, detail, complexity, uniqueness. The development of abstract art by Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian and other early modern artists prefigures cyberspace in an explicit turning away from representations of known nature. Artists have always invented worlds—from Chinese watercolor landscapes to the strange landscape background in the Mona Lisa—but those worlds usu­ ally made reference to some familiar reality. Even when that reality was of a cosmic or mystical nature, we still find an assumption of similarity to the everyday world. Modern artists were the first to take on the task of inventing entire worlds without explicit reference to external reality. For Bathysphere, my idea was to build a space that had no Cartesian X, Y, or Z directions, no logical spatial rules. I wanted to invent interesting forms, shapes, and colors and cre­ ate imaginative and expres­ sive motions for them. 478 Digital Salon, Artists' Statements ...