I’ve been working with a simple morph program for about a year now morphing photos of objects one into another. The labor is beginning to bear fruit. The process is a painstaking one. I start with a 10 frame morph then I create 9 short inter-frame morphs. Doing it this way I am able to control and manipulate the way the objects and shapes move as they transform one into another. The effect is eerie. The motion appears at times to be similar to a time-lapse photograph of a flower growing. At other times the movement has the disjunctive motion similar to a new-born baby who hasn’t learned to control its muscles yet.

Burlesques Contemporains at the Jeu de Paume – June 6th – September 6th, 2005
Art Dirt Redux - mp3
This show is the brainchild of Christophe Kihm who is a managing editor at Art Press (the French equivalent of Artforum). Each year Art Press does a special edition on a critical point of view. In 2003, Kihm did the special edition and the theme was le burlesque. For the Jeu De Paume exhibition the other contemporary French art magazine Beaux Arts did a special edition catalog. “… burlesque is linked to action. Originally, it was a practice that involved an entire array of physical techniques and action. Its’ range is fairly broad, in that a body’s response to space is determined by constantly changing contexts and situations. Burlesque can even be expanded to include artistic gestures and ideas when a process of reversal similar to that exerted on a body (by means of force, competence. Gravity, etc.) is applied. A definition of seeing always includes the act of setting a distance, which always has something to do with morality. On the other hand, I think that there is something amoral about burlesque.” Christophe Kihm, Burlesques Contemporains catalog, page 25.

Today I'm getting on a plane to go to Paris. My collaborative piece (with Peter Sinclair) A SoaPOPera for Laptops/iMacs is in the Summer Exhibition of the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. This is a big deal for me considering the fact that I don't have an art dealer backing me. Anyway, The Jeu de Paume was orginally Marie Antoinette's handball court.

As I continue doing Art Dirt Redux I realize how different and advanced the series is. All art works bring realizations. As a working artist part of the work is to focus on the process and through that focus understand what you are doing. It’s odd because art making, the creative process is by its nature partially unconscious. That’s why it is different from say, computer programming or a manufacturing procedure. With any procedural process one expects a specific outcome. There are no surprises and no realizations. With art it's different. You engage in the process to be surprised by the outcome. Art Dirt Redux is sound art. It’s influences are Musique Concrete and early conceptual art documentation works such as Robert Morris’ piece, Sculpture With The Sound Of Its Own Making.

ADR- May 13th&19th

I’m beginning to think that our sense of time is rather arbitrary. The way our minds work we organize information to make sense of it. This continues to happen when I sit down to mash-up Art Dirt Redux. Rob says the theme of Chelsea is alienation and obfuscation. I crack a bad joke. Later in our walk we go to the Richard Prince exhibition that has several paintings of bad jokes. While mixing the tracks I overlap our walk through Jasper John and John Simon Jr. What occurs is an overlap discussion of a computer painting program and the structure of Japer John’s paintings, which is also a painting program or logical structure of sorts. As we sit down to eat Rob talks about how his apartment search is becoming a performance piece with him as the audience. I didn’t know we would see the joke paintings yet I cracked a bad joke. The question is how fluid is time?

Object-Morph-Video

I started experimenting with morphing objects in 2002 as part of my video performance work Smart House/ Dumb Interactivity. Smart House/ Dumb Interactivity is the theme of my Masters’ Thesis which I recently completed at NYU. The thesis is in two parts; a 40 page theoretical paper and a video performance. The paper can be downloaded as a pdf from paper The video can be viewed via quicktime streaming here videoThe idea in part came from a notion that in the future a smart house would be self-cleaning. When the owner was not at home the house would begin a cleaning cycle where it would move the furniture around, dust, straighten and arrange all the objects, pictures etc. in the home and have the place spic and span when the owner returned. One of the oft repeated complaints of any homemaker is that their cleaning person tears through their home leaving everything askew or putting things back in places where they don’t belong. Assuming that a marketing person and an engineer would get together to solve this complaint for the self cleaning home, I thought about how one might teach a home to return the objects to their rightful place after cleaning. I imagined that a simple set of webcams and mapping software would accomplish this. All the Smart Home need do was take a snapshot before cleaning and moving the objects and furniture around and then later return the objects to their place using the snapshot and image map as a guide.

Art Dirt Redux – 3 months out

I had been toying with the idea of a podcast when Robbin Murphy came back into New York to start upgrading The Thing’s web portal http://post.thing.net. Rob & I and Adrianne Wortzel were doing Art Dirt in the 90’s out of Pseudo as a webcast. Rob & I thought it would be interesting to do an “on location” Art Dirt podcast. Thus the name Art Dirt Redux. The original Art Dirt was a round table talk show that began as one of the first audio webcasts and later was upgraded to streaming video. Pseudo’s head Josh Harris was a visionary and had the idea of setting up a media outlet using the internet that would compete with broadcast and cable TV. The programs on pseudo were structured like mass media programs with commercial breaks.