In the frontier world of web technology I have found a medium that encompasses and expands the lush, pluralistic and multi-layered qualities of my previous dada-inspired photomontage work. Freed from the restricting two-dimensional context by technological advances,
I engage in fragmented narratives and sub-narratives that form and reform as multiple windows open and close.
I orchestrate layers of history, including journal entries, sketches, written records, video, photographs, music, voice and general sound loops, resulting in a atmospheric investigation into states of being.
Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance (2006)
Web based video. Indefinite loop
Triptych: Motion Stillness Resistance is a generative, video-based triptych that explores three dynamics: motion, stillness and resistance. Each panel of Triptych focuses on one dynamic and uses these as visual metaphors for universal emotive and cognitive states taken from and reflecting my personal experiences. In Triptych three separate video streams run simultaneously in three panels. These videos are randomly chosen from a central database of stored footage associated with each individual panel. Self-structuring and generative, each time Triptych is viewed the outcome is unique. There is no audio component to this work.
Tenderly Yours (2005)
Web based audio / video
Running time 10 minutes
Tenderly Yours resituates the personal, casual and ambiguous approach of French new wave cinema in a net art narrative that explores love, loss and memory.
The story is recited by a striking and illustrious persona, who moves through the city with her lover. Her willful independence is intoxicating, though her sense of self is ambiguous and a fear of intimacy consuming. Then, one day she suddenly disappears. Her lover is left bewildered and is posed to question whether she is a fiction, who fades with every passing recollection. At this moment, her face reappears only to be united with that of a movie actress, whose striking resemblance further questions the certainty of her existence.
Here we encounter a series of filmic ‘doubles’, of French new wave cinema rendered as net art and in turn, of net art as cinema. Furthermore, there is a doubling of realization, of love at once found but then gone, and of the real and imagined states of loss.
Celina Jeffery
Intervals (2004)
Web based audio / video.
Running time 8 minutes
Intervals explores a series of characters whose investigation of self and identity unfold and elide through a sequence of cinematic interludes. Hovering through an amorphous landscape we begin by observing the mirror images of four animated figures. At once seductive and illusive, these portraits successively expose their most intimate selves through accounts of lost innocence, fear of the unknown, masculine ritual and the mystery of love. Here identity is subject to slippages, distortions, and to filmic alter egos that mimic and echo their subjects’ memory.
Horvath’s innovative use of pop-up windows create a virtual collage that posit identity as a series of random ‘memory acts’ but whose inquiry accumulate into a slowly revealing narrative of the human condition.
Celina Jeffery
Album (2004) From the net. Based exhibition
entitled “Pause”
Web based audio / video.
Running time 7 minutes.
Unfolding as consciousness itself, Album is a work of collected imagery and sound. This memory piece, which may be considered a condensed historical tracing, reveals a fictional biography that reflects upon the history of an individual recalling experiences of a life in the turbulence of the 20th century.
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Peter Horvath
works in video, sound, photo and new media. Camera in hand since age 6, he inhaled darkroom fumes until his late 20‘s, then began exploring time based art processes. He immersed himself in digital technologies at the birth of the Web, co-founded 6168.org, a site for net.art, and adopted techniques of photomontage which he uses in his net and print based works. Exhibitions include the Whitney Museum Of American Art‘s Artport, the 18th Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Stuttgart, Germany), FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sâo Paulo, Brazil), Video Zone International Video Art Biennial (Tel Aviv, Israel), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec City, Canada), as well as venues in New York, Tokyo, London, and numerous net.art showings. He is the recipient of commissions from Rhizome.org at The New Museum, NYC (2005) and Turbulence.org New Radio and Performing Arts, Boston (2004). A founding member of the net.art collective Hell.com, he likes to consider a future when high bandwidth will be free.
Triptych: Motion stillness resisstance
Commissioned for Rhizome.org, with support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.
Tenderly yours
Featuring, and narration spoken by Joséphine Truffaut.
Special thanks to Max Dean, Nichola Feldman-Kiss, Micah J. Meisner Pamela Neal and Joséphine Truffaut.
Intervals
Intervals is a 2004 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
With contributions from and thanks to Micah J. Meisner, Pamela Neal, Chris Soos and Stacy Wan.
Thanks also to Malcolm Sweeny, Clint Roenisch, Gariné Torossian, Karen Machtinger, Marcus Schubert and T. Whid.
Album
Piano concerto composed and performed by Lenni Jabour.
Part of the PAUSE exhibition from mobilegaze.org.
In collaboration w/ Oboro Gallery, Montreal, Images Festival and InterAccess New Media Centre, Toronto
