Chuck Ivy presents his 2012 Glasstire Virtual Residency.
I consider myself a research artist, developing rules, frameworks and systems with which I investigate media and culture. Through a balance of algorithmic process and personal aesthetic, I synthesize video, generative photography, cut-up texts, sound collages and other New Media art often stemming from appropriated materials. My interest in these methods stems, in part, from the early tape-loop audio moires of Steve Reich and the culture jamming collage work of the band Negativland.
Much of my recent work has been dealing with the stretching and contracting of time as applied to mass media and popular film. In my 2009-2010 series “Cataract Cinémathèque” I wrote software to collapse minutes from movies into still images. Last year I developed “24 Hour Psycho Killer”, stretching the Talking Heads performance of “Psycho Killer” from their concert film Stop Making Sense, and making it 24 hours long as an homage to Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho.”
In my latest series, “4xTrailers”, developed for the Glasstire Virtual Residency, I have created a new series of videos, stretching movie trailers to roughly four times their normal length and re-posting them to the web. Movie trailers are an interesting form of advertising, often becoming mini-movies in their own right. They are a pervasive and often persuasive part of the media culture, and it is fascinating to look at them in retrospect and see how they have changed over the years.
In the 1960s some French writers and mathematicians developed Oulipo in an effort to add constraints to their writing. Essentially they were creating story-making machines. I feel like much of the art that I make isn’t so much art itself as art-making systems which can be fed an input and will, based on that input, generate a text, photo, sound, video or interactive work of art. I am very process-driven in my art practice, so a large part of my residency was spent developing the process to create this series. I went through 5 different programming languages, finally teaching myself enough Python scripting to get my machine to do what I envisioned. Then it became a matter of feeding it source material. I chose a wide range of genres and eras of film to represent, from screwball comedies to thrillers, pulling from my own DVD collection. I think part of my interest is not in looking at just one piece, but in comparing a few and how my process distorts their original intent.
All the videos are posted to https://vimeo.com/4xTrailers. Enjoy! – Chuck Ivy
