I’ve been thinking lately about how our experience of film, as it has moved on to more portable devices, revises the intimacy of narrative.

Most contemporary television drama employs the steadycam – sometimes exclusively – using cranes and dollies mainly for establishing the scene. These perspectival qualities can be seen as far back as the 1962 documentary Lonely Boy which employs cameras newly made portable and lending them well to intimate settings like automobile interiors.

Today’s screens are ubiquitous with portability. The receiver in the model has looped back to propose a paradigmatic inversion, where new affordances aren’t opportunities for expression, but rather serve to define the parameters of engagement (consumption) and inform the mandate for content creation.

This video work introduces a new modality of steadycam awareness on an older production style (1983′s The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman). The strong contrast between inside (the Mercury space capsule as state-of-the-art technology) and outside (the natural world) on which this movement is imposed shows how modern modes of shooting consistently define a space in which our first-hand perspective is simulated.

I hope this keeps y’all in the loop.

click the image to view the gallery

The site will act as both a portfolio and a database of my work and praxis. Eventually it will consume the parts of this blog that are art related, and the ideograph.biz will house posts related to my business.

I am hoping my site will be a prototype for even greater things to come, as I build out artist-centric tools and configurations on the drupal platform.

I’ve been told that the organizers that about 100,000 people tuned in to the live stream (though not simultaneously), which kinda turned upside down my whole perception of the event and my experience with audience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other artists in the presentation: Machiko Kusahara, Ryota Kuwakubo, Toshio Iwai, Theo Jansen, Sachiko Kodama, Maywa Denki.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Off World is a 24-hour, month-long interactive public installation part of the 2009 Contact Toronto Photography Festival. It is an exhibition of photographs and video by filmmaker Mateo Guez and commissioned by curator Sanaz Mazinani, realized in situ as a 24-hour interactive public installation by me, Andrew Mallis.

The exhibition ran all of May 2009 at CAMERA, an extension of the Stephen Bulger Gallery, located at 1028 Queen Street West, in Toronto, Canada.

the video is intended to be played vertically. Just tilt your head.

Using the Processing language, an image of da Vinci’s La Jaconde – the most reproduced image in the world – is corrupted over time. With each conversion between image formats, a frame is recorded. The title coyly references Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 readymade.

Simulations of reality are prevalent in the video games and cinematic effects that substitute for the immersive space once offered exclusively by painting. As mental landscapes adjust themselves to these new realities, painting offers a visual language established through historical precedent that favors contemplation.

Interaction with digital technology is, for most of us, an important part of our everyday experience. The post-industrial economy has shifted the worker from the factory to the office desk, from the lever to the mouse.

In an age of almost exclusively digital reproduction, the last bastions of analog recording are visibly fading. In recent years, Kodak has imploded buildings previously dedicated to paper operations, signaling not the timely death of the analog, but rather its deliberate annihilation.

With what fidelity are we reproducing our environ- ment? What impact does the pixelization of the visible spectrum have on our perception? Lossy compression reduces file size by sacrificing pixel fidelity for an ap- proximation, for pre-determined patterns.

YouTube’s phenomenal popularity is unhindered by the poor resolution and low sound quality of the site’s (massive) video archive. This speaks to a wetted appetite for content, story, meaning over glamour, high production value, and form. In the context of our everyday experience becoming increasingly mediated, we must to ask ourselves: how lossy do we want our reality?

the Duchamp original, circa 1919

“Visual culture of the modern period, from painting to cinema, is characterized by an intriguing phenomenon: the existence of another virtual space, another three-dimensional world enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space.”

Lev Manovich, An Archeology of a Computer Screen
NewMediaTopia. Moscow, Soros Center for the Contemporary Art, 1995

Many modern painters actively use digital photographic sources for photo reference, even painting along side their computer screens. The “live model” is in this case dead, frozen in screen-space even before it is observed by the painter. The subject-object relationship implodes as the artist involves themselves in an act of media translation. The artist’s mark is left on the image like artifacts in JPEG compression.