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Archetypal Africa
In this work, Bigelow takes everyday objects (stapler, chair, spoon) and elevates them to archetypal status through several strategies:
* short, looping background videos (with audio) of natural scenes, usually focused on animals or plants, intercut with brief images of the object being discussed.
* A poetic description of the object, using metaphor, personification, and other figurative language to highlight their function or role.
* A scheduled set of fake historical events involving the object, often absurd and hilarious, including the location and the date in which they happened.
This level of attention to everyday objects is parallel to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, but with a different approach to its language choices. While Stein chooses language that belongs to the same semantic frame of the objects she describes, Bigelow breaks (or blends) the frames to take a twist towards the absurd. These objects become archetypal because they are presented as tools that shape their creators as much as the world around them, connecting them to nature and humanity at a global level.
eabigelow - 28.06.2012 - 03:41
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Terminal Time
Terminal Time is a history "engine:" a machine which combines historical events, ideological rhetoric, familiar forms of TV documentary, consumer polls and artificial intelligence algorithms to create hybrid cinematic experiences for mass audiences that are different every single time. History as it was meant to be told!
History is in your hands! Through an audience response-measuring device (applause-meter) connected to a computer, viewing audiences respond to periodic questions reminiscent of marketing polls. These questions occur every 6 minutes during the story. The loudest applause determines the winning answer.
Your answers to these questions allow the computer program to create historical narratives that mirror and even exaggerate your biases and desires. Just clap, watch and enjoy. At long last, Terminal Time gives you the history you deserve!
Scott Rettberg - 06.12.2012 - 16:25
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The Knotted Line
The Knotted Line is an interactive, tactile laboratory for exploring the historical relationship between freedom and confinement in the geographic area of the United States. With miniature paintings of over 50 historical moments from 1495-2025, The Knotted Line asks: how is freedom measured? Just as importantly, The Knotted Line imagines a new world through the work of grassroots movements for self-determination.
(Source: The Knotted Line home page)
Scott Rettberg - 21.12.2012 - 15:09
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Pyxis Byzantium
Pyxis Byzantium is a hypermedia narrative investigation into the fall of Byzantium in 1453. Surrounded by enemy forces for decades, the final invasion of the city was widely anticipated by some of the populace, denied by others, and a focus of wonder and prayer. This piece imagines several different residents of the city, their fears and hopes, and their beliefs about the sources of destiny. The navigation includes maps of the city, sacred holidays, and the chronology of the destruction. Because of its extensive use of Flash, it is not currently playable in original form.
Artist's Statement:
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 16:24
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The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen
Exploring connections between surveillance and interference in the lives of artists, "The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen" is a hyperlibretto where the experience of a wedding celebration is created with words, graphic icons, and glockenspiel intermezzi.
Artist Statement
"The Wedding Celebration of Gunter and Gwen" is informed by a strategy of following signs and signifiers that point to ancient systems of control of people's lives. It is a device used by Dan Brown in Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code, although actually it was through the performance artist's strategy of looking at hypertextual connections in my own eventful life that "Celebration" took on this aspect.
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 16:29
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Feed
Our deeply ingrained need to trust language enables Feed to generate an endless simulacrum of social commentary cum mythopoeic narrative spontaneously from largely random associations of charged words. It presents cultural observation through the blind eye of chance. The blank passing moment becomes the creator of mythos. It allows us the opportunity to turn ambiguity into poetry, absurdity into satire, unexpected fortuitous alignments into insight. Feed chronicles the mechanisms of the chronicle rather than its subjects. It removes “realism” from the equation, flirting with the meaningless and parading arbitrary associations before the reader under the banners of archetype and metaphor. Feed historicizes, editorializes, moralizes, sings, dances, and wears funny hats, all in the name of “analyzing” its own inventions.
(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI Conference)
Scott Rettberg - 11.04.2013 - 11:04
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Sc4nda1 in New Media
At heart any scandal is a story, or a thing of many stories; sc4nda1 is even more peculiar, but also begins with a telling.
What you have before you started as an essay (or intent to rant) about an observation I kept reading in recent criticism, that electronic writing has not been properly dressed for the serious table. Where, the questions ran, are the publishers, the editors, the established and establishing critics? In a time of intense experiment and innovation, who says which textual deviations make real difference, and which are just bizarre? More ominously: where are the naive, casual readers, the seekers of pleasurable text who ought to move design's desire? To spin an old friend's epigraph, just who, exactly, finds this funhouse fun?
Scott Rettberg - 15.10.2013 - 11:01
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Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was developed at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) for the CAVE2™, the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality 320-degree panoramic environment which provides users with the ability to see 3D stereoscopic content in a near seamless flat LCD technology at 37 Megapixels in 3D resolution matching human visual acuity. The CAVE immerses people into worlds too large, too small, too dangerous, too remote, or too complex to be viewed otherwise. This project makes use of the CAVE environment for a multisensory artwork that addresses a complex contemporary problem: as American soldiers are returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that some of them participated in interrogation practices and acts of abusive violence with detainees for which they were not properly trained or psychologically prepared. This has in turn left many soldiers dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on their return home, and left many unresolved questions about the moral calculus of using torture as an interrogation strategy in military operations.
Alvaro Seica - 11.11.2014 - 20:02
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Le Dernier Volcan
This video project explores Norwegian folk histories that return as fragments in light of ongoing volcanic eruptions. The project was recorded in Bergen following the disruptions caused by the activities of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. A folk history of disaster is set against slowly revolving images set in a contemporary landscape. This is the first of a series of works recorded in Norway that juxtapose folk histories and contemporary events to explore narrative and associative characteristics of cultural anxieties and collective memory. The project was researched and filmed by Roderick Coover in 2010 thanks to a distinguished-scholar-in-residence award from the University of Bergen.
Alvaro Seica - 13.11.2014 - 23:32
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The Upside-Down Chandelier
This multiplatform digital work references an event connected with the history of Košice and its tobacco factory from 1851 which employed mostly women workers. Some decades later, when St. Elizabeth's Cathedral was being renovated, the women workers donated a candle chandelier. The chandelier itself was repurposed twice – from the original candles, to gas lighting and with the advent of electricity, was turned upside down. In the installation, images of the chandelier from the cathedral are randomly generated and projected onto a screen in a flux of forms. Simultaneously the words connected with this story appear projected on the walls of the room, and phonetic sounds from Slovakian, Hungarian and German are generatively mixed in to create the soundscape of languages that were once spoken in the very same place by women workers.
Thor Baukhol Madsen - 05.02.2015 - 16:02
