Final Project

It is important that we, in the current age, pay attention to how the internet and the media presented within, and accompanied by, the internet affects us. Not only in how the internet affects culture and society at large, but more so how we absorb and interact with the internet. We were tasked with associating our final projects with one of our readings. I was interested in "Clusterfuck Esthetics", by Jerry Saltz, and the notion of "maximalism". In art, I'm drawn to the practice of working within the confines of an extreme; whether it be the extreme of minimalism or the extreme of maximalism, I feel that it can add a unique skew to an otherwise unremarkable piece of work. I combined this interest with my interest in the internet age and crafted a video that was comprised of short, one second clips from the internet. I purposely sent myself into a "youtube spiral" and that's how I gathered the videos that I did. I wanted it to be frantic and uncomfortable, aggressive and curious. In doing this, I was attempted to remove any sort of coherence or narrative that viewers might usually try to ascribe to video. I was also trying to mirror the split-second attention span that the internet implants within us by offering all its information in short, bite-sized, bursts. The audio is simply the audio of the videos layered together, which I feel adds to the frantic nature of the piece. I'm quite pleased with it. Perhaps it needed to be longer, with shorter clips. That might have further pushed what I was trying to go for.