gcraighobbs /210 /Artist_Statement

Artist Statement

My work addresses themes at the intersection of nature, culture, and technology in the mediums of photography, film/ video, interactive programming, and live video performance. My creative process is rooted in collaboration, and is interdisciplinary by nature.

I am interested in creating experimental contexts for video performance. In homage to the tradition of visual music and early cinematic experimentation, and inspired by artists such as Larry Cuba, James Whitney, and Dziga Vertov, my work both reflects and amplifies the themes established in the experimentalism of the 1920's and 1970’s - abstraction, algorithmic geometry, color fields, feedback, visual narratives, and the establishment of meditational space.

Using digital technology, I am able to explore both abstract and narrative themes simultaneously through database-driven content archives. The archives serve as re-contextualization engines, allowing an ebb and flow of narrative continuity and abstraction. Within the context of music performance, my work takes on performative aspects as a visualist, or visual musician, and functions as both collaborative art making and collective storytelling. I work from an extensive collection of found, archival, public domain, and self-produced material including photography, digital video, and real-time data sources. Content is synthesized into site-specific video performances utilizing generative software applications, hardware mixers, and video projectors.

In its ideal form the visualist and the musician enter into a symbiotic relationship, producing a dialogic stream of content and form in realtime performance. Subtle mutations are explored through ongoing collaboration, experimentation, and cinematographic exploration. Through photography and digital video as a mode of being, I am always on the lookout for emergent sources of visual stimuli to integrate within performance contexts, as much as scouting locations within which performances can emerge. Site specificity implies context specificity in new works/ new spaces for performance and content acquisition.

My recent work is focused around the idea of narrative synthesis. Informed by both progressive and recursive form in film and music, I am interested in narrative themes as conveyed through mise-en-scène, milieu, ambience, and space, as much as traditional plot and compositional structure. I am specifically interested in developing a content-typing schema for digital video and audio files to be used in both live performance and autonomously generated installations. I seek to develop performance and programming methodologies for scene and event driven narratives influenced by architectural space, viewer presence/ input, the passage of time, and situational conditions using object oriented programming environments such as Processing and MAX/MSP.