projects

ACM: youConnect

Are Flagan: Over the RGB Rainbow

Joy Garnett: War Projects

Ryan Griffis: Gift(Wrap)ing New Media

Stacy Hardy/Dror Eyal: FrictionFree

Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga: Games

MSDM: Outsourcing

War Projects::Joy Garnett

The Bomb Project :: Trinity Suite :: Get Your Agitprop On!

I have always been interested in finding and engaging relationships between seemingly unrelated things; take painting on one hand, and information networks on the other. As a painter whose methods rely heavily on the Web for both raw imagery and raw information, I constantly find myself butting one paradigm up against another. Prior to conceiving and building The Bomb Project, for example, image research for paintings gave rise to atlases of digital images, declassified footage and links. These were filed away until I felt obliged to organize them on their own web page, their own project, whereby their function as raw material gave way to a new, more significant role. Data mining gives rise to art, and the art feeds back into new potential for creating contextual frameworks.
For me, in the end, the image remains the primary portal or 'information object,' regardless of its virtual or material nature. In all of these projects, the virtual and material keep abutting one another and merging. For Trinity Suite, I located the declassified 16-millimeter film of the first atomic bomb test that had been digitized and uploaded to the Web as a QuickTime movie; I printed out screen shots, painted the sequence on 6x9 inch canvases, scanned each painting as a separate frame and reanimated them. All the conventional or practical distinctions between "old" and "new" media were happily discarded. In Get Your Agitprop On!, US government PSYOPs leaflets that had been dropped over Kosovo in 1999 were refashioned from digital scans found on the website of the Federation of American Scientists; these were uploaded to a web page as pdf files, to be printed out and distributed yet again as anti-war posters addressing the impending war on Iraq. The material and the virtual keep re-engendering one another, depending on the situation.
[Joy Garnett, February 2003]