[Reader-list] POP_Remix @ Camerawork

[Marisa S. Olson]

Hello. I'm writing to announce the opening of POP_Remix, at SF 
Camerawork. A description of the show is below. If you are in town, 
please stop by our opening, on Tuesday, May 11. It is going to be a 
TON of fun--with work made from Starsky & Hutch, Super Mario games, 
and Marilyn Monroe films, among other pop sources, this is probably 
the most fun I've ever had curating a show!

We are also having a number of fun events, including a hacking 
demonstration by Cory Arcangel & Alex Galloway (5/10 in Mountain 
View, co-sponsored with Zero1 & Leonardo ISAST) and a screening of 
"Enjoy!" and "Value-Added Cinema" (5/18, in the downstairs theatre). 
Check here for more details: http://www.sfcamerawork.org/events.html

POP_Remix
May 11-June 12, Opening Reception May 11, 5-8pm
SF Camerawork-1246 Folsom-SF, CA 94103 USA

Cory Arcangel / BEIGE, Matthew Biederman, Anthony Discenza, Radical 
Software Group (RSG) featuring Alex Galloway, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, 
Paul Pfeiffer

{{This exhibition is accompanied by an issue of Camerawork: A Journal 
of Photographic Arts, featuring essays by Lev Manovich, Philip 
Sherburne, José Luis de Vicente, and others.}}

The Pop art era of Warhol and Lichtenstein may have officially come 
to pass, but the movement has not ended. In today's moving image 
culture, the context of Pop art is ripe for reconsideration-a 
"remixing" if you willŠ The creative strategy of appropriation has 
only grown, in function and in source-material, since the Television 
experiments and video art of the 1960s. Just as Pop artists of that 
era lifted logos and vernacular imagery, the work in POP_Remix takes 
as its marrow appropriated segments of popular films, TV programs, 
and video games. The deconstructed and remixed results serve as 
meditations on mainstream image-making and its cultural import.

Anthony Discenza is concerned with the engorgement of our lives by 
the images of "mediated culture." His work thus attempts to realize 
the decay of the images that work to "decay" our selves. This effort 
appears to us in the form of often painterly, abstract, or 
kaleidoscopic video (de)constructions. Here he presents portraits of 
three "Hosts," the yield of layering footage of seven major network 
news anchors.

Paul Pfeiffer explores the visual histories of the film, TV, and 
digital/video eras, Pfeiffer's projects often take up issues in (and 
parallels among) religion, sports, colonialism, racism, masculinity, 
and power. In his photographic series, Four Horsemen of the 
Apocalypse, Pfeiffer has "erased" iconic images of Marilyn Monroe 
from film stills, leaving only a hazy vacant landscape.

Through techniques of parody, pastiche, and laborious dissection, 
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy explore the enculturating impacts of genre and 
narrative structure. For Every Shot, Every Episode, the McCoys 
created a database of every shot in every episode of "Starsky and 
Hutch." Viewers can choose to play disks categorizing the indexed 
data. In How I Learned, the McCoys similarly catalogued episodes from 
the show "Kung-Fu," rhetorically asking 'if all you ever knew about 
the world you learned from this show, what would you know?'

Matthew Biederman is also engaged in deconstructing TV clips. In his 
AleatoryTV, a computer scans a channel of live TV for specific words 
via speech recognition algorithms. The words form a sentence, 
pre-selected by the artist. As the agent "hears" the words on TV, it 
samples the audio and visual content that accompanies it, placing the 
clip in a loop that is continuously played back on a large 
television. New utterances of the word replace old ones and the 
process begins anew each day.

In 2x2 Alex Galloway, founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG) 
"degrades" video clips from popular films and TV programs into linear 
animations two pixels tall by two pixels wide. The flickering clips 
are played on GameBoys. Galloway's Prepared PlayStation 2 uses 
unmodified versions of the PlayStation game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 
to exploit "bugs and glitches in the code to create dirty, jolting 
game loops." Both projects point to an internal collapse of the 
system within which they signify.

In NES Home Movies: 8bit Landscape Studies Cory Arcangel spins a tale 
about his youth, traced by those images he grew up staring at, thus 
revealing his identity to be, in a sense "photosensitive." They work 
effects a reverse of the trajectory of the image's "evolution" from 
still to film to video to video game by reverse-engineering his 8-bit 
videos into panoramic photographs.His relayering of self-composed 
Detroit-style rock or old school raver tunes over remixed clips of 
Mario and his environs, in Video Ravings, brings new meaning to the 
work it mimes. In defiance to the commercially-driven "evolution" of 
machine culture, and in recognition of the formal origin of these 
remixes, Arcangel saves the new videos on game cartridges and runs 
them on original Nintendos.

In each of these works we can begin to chart the cultural shift from 
accessing screen-based photographic images in the forms of cinematic 
projections, to television screens, to hand-held screens. With each 
shift there have come physical and cultural shifts, among them a 
change in the allowed modes of representation and access of these 
images. In each case, the machinery of a work of art dictates the 
conditions of its production, distribution, and-arguably-its 
interpretation. These issues are at the heart of Pop art, alongside 
questions about authorship, the status of the multiple, and 
interrogations of commodity fetishism.

Overall, the exhibition serves as a meditation on mainstream 
image-making and its cultural import. Each project is at once 
accessible-even fun!-by virtue of its relationship to pop culture, 
while simultaneously revealing the deeper cumulative effects of our 
relationship to its content. Ultimately, we are invited to consider 
the impacts these popular lens-based genres have had upon the ways in 
which we choose to look at the world.  -Marisa S. Olson, Curator

SF Camerawork encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore 
new directions in photography and related media by fostering creative 
forms of expression that push existing boundaries.  This year marks 
our 30th Anniversary.

We would like to extend special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation 
for the Arts, Zero: One, Leonardo ISAST, the Hotel Tax Fund of San 
Francisco Grants for the Arts, Hosfelt Gallery, Lucasey Mounting 
Systems, Steven Blumenkrantz, Jona Frank, Anthony Laurino, and Thomas 
Meyer.
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