JIM CAMPBELL COLOUR BY NUMBERS

JIM CAMPBELL
From the Color Works series
Color By Number, 1999
Two video projectors, LCD screens, custom electronics, dimensions variable

Color by Number involves creating an environment in which a sequence of colors is connected to an image by relying on the viewer's memory and associations. This version consists of 2 large video screens set into the walls of a hallway. Seen on these two screens are slowly changing colored light fields. Next to these dynamic color field squares is an open doorway which allows the viewer to go behind the wall to find the source of the colored light. When the viewers goes behind the wall containing the color fields they see two large beams of colored light, one for each of the squares on the wall. The changing light is created by ceiling mounted video projectors throwing light onto rear projection screens. Behind each color field and below the projector is a video screen mounted on the wall revealing a single video image. When the viewers look closely at one of these video stills they see a single white pixel slowly moving from the left to the right and then down one line, slowly scanning the image. It soon becomes clear that the moving white pixel represents the location of the color that is currently being displayed on the large square rear projection screen. The missing pixel is magnified to the three feet by three feet square of light. The first still image is of a lotus flower and the second image is of one of the Vietnamese monks who set himself on fire during the Vietnam War.

http://www.jimcampbell.tv/

This blog will contain views on artists and works that I find vivifying, and works which I dislike intensely and sometimes blogs on works I hated and then fell in love with, we all have them, sometimes they slowly creep into your life and wear away your hardened veneer,what fat on a chair! you have got to be kidding,an upturned urinal? are you taking the p****?

SOPHIE CALLE COULDN'T CAPTURE DEATH

Sophie Calle. In two stark rooms, viewers are presented with a wall text explaining that she learned that her mother had but a month left to live the same day she received a call inviting Calle to exhibit at the Biennale. In the next room is a video of her mother resting peacefully in her final hours with medical attendants hovering over her; her favorite music, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major, plays in the background as the screen eventually fades into darkness.

I JUST NEED A SCREAM LOVER SO I DON'T HAVE TO SCREAM ALONE

Sample Digital Manipulated Images 'Akemi Takeya' By Stephan Peter Oates

STILL SCREAMING

FRANCIS BACON

Study after Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953

SCAR TISSUE

FRANCIS BACON FACE TO FACE

STUDY FOR THREE HEADS 1962

The powers of a dark prophet, the spiralling demise of Francis Bacon, who left a biography of a tortured soul, a tale of miss-spent youth, and ill judged love affairs, screaming from distorted faces with silent words.

When asked to explain his paintings, Francis Bacon replied "If I could explain them, I wouldn't have to paint them".

But you don't have to be a genius to feel the pain that his work spits out to you , for me a painting by Bacon, speaks of that inner rage, when mania is at full throttle, if anything, Bacon is my Therapist, my pope confessor, a silent confidant, a misty dark mirror that tells the future you don't want to hear. S.P.Oates Oct 2007.

MARCEL DUCHAMP'S LEGACY

MARCEL DUCHAMP

(Marcel Duchamp without whom Richard Mutt's Fountain blog would not exist). It is quite amusing that we discuss Duchamp in such detailed and academic ways, when analysing Duchamp’s influential contribution to contemporary art, it can not be deigned that his unique approach as inspired generations of new artists from Rausenburg to Hirst, and it is also true to say that Duchamp understood as early a 1912-1913, that the opposition between academic art and vanguard art was no longer a valid issue.

For me the majority of Duchamp's works do not work so well visually but engage the mind, I’m sure he would love that his work as been resurrected but his disdain for the academic elitism would leave a bitter taste in his mouth, much as the elitist attitude towards ‘Nude Descending the Stairs’ did when it was rejected by his Cubist comrades, Duchamp brought opposition between Modernism and the Academic to show it as a dead end, he would have been happy that finally the slow unravelling of his work was revealed bringing about the results he had intended, but disgusted had he been alive today to see it taken to the level of high theory by the academia.

(S.P.Oates Oct 2007)

These Fragments I have stored against my ruins T.S.Elliot (Wasteland)1922

Post Script T.S.Elliot was a Sexist, Racist, Bigot and his views do not represent the views of Richard Mutt's Fountain/Three Dollar Haircut or its editor!

Research Akemi Takeya

This video work screams like a Francis Bacon painting of the pope, a purple howling mouth in white scar tissued screams, leaving the flesh that remains, blurred, fragmented features, transparent, deformed in this way or other, forsaken monsters in an already disjointed world.

(Stephan Peter Oates: Oct 2007)

AKEMI TAKEYA

From a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya to a frenzied exploration of the alter ego, any known context of meaning ends in the dissolved movements, is stalled in denaturalized redundancy, in machine pain. The semantic void is too loud to be amenable to meditative reception. The frontal images, the rhythmic structures generate contradictory emotions and great strain. Entertainment is offered and almost violently denied. At the highest level of energy, enjoyment reaches the limit." Sample session performed by Akemi Takeya. Edited on various AVID Suites in England and Austria between 1994-96.Produced by: Mike Stubbs, at HTBA (Hull Time Based Arts) in Hull England.Co-produced by PYRAMEDIA Vienna.

http://www.granularsynthesis.info/start/ns/content_ns.php?goto=modell%205

SCREAM MY LOVER SCREAM!

AKEMI TAKEYA: Self Portrait. Employing monumental projected images and bludgeoning sound environments, the multimedia installations of Akemi Takeya mark a new stage in the esthetic of sensory overload.

For those of you who were blown away by Akemi Takeya's video performances with GRANULAR=SYNTHESIS check out her U-Tube video pieces, of which there are many, and while your at it check out Granular=Synthesis's website, you would be daft not to, trust me. 10/10

http://www.granularsynthesis.info/start/ns/