The Kids Spilt The Kool Aid

In the Fall of 2013, I installed a three screen generational time capsule in the first floor of the Weitz Center for Creativity in collaboration with CAMS 270: Nonfiction and CAMS 283: Site-Specific Media. The following video is documentation of the installation and turns the 3D phenomenological experience of the project and condenses it into a simple video work. 

Starting with a Huffington Post article about who Millennials are, I set about deconstructing the processes in which a generation can be boiled down to set characteristics and traits. By presenting a time capsule that overloads a viewer with information, I am asking viewers to wade through the work and create their own meaning and definitions of our generations. The work asks that you pick and pull and expand it to find a community representation. 

The combination of found footage, which represents the past and how we have evolved, the montage with intertitles, which shows us in the constructed present delayed by a mere couple of weeks and months, and the live webcam which represents our future create a nuanced time capsule and invites the viewer to still be in control of their image (via webcam). 

Below is the artist statement of the piece: 

We have seen it all and yearn to do something about it.

The Kids Spilt the Kool-Aid (TKSKA) is a meditation and ambivalent exploration of the generation of inbetweeners - the starting and endpoints, respectfully, of Generation X and Millennials. It is an experimental nonfiction work that serves as symbolic time capsule of our identities as individuals and a group. 

The three screens give the viewer the processes in which the generational generalizations are created. Screen one is the past, which we rebel against and create oppositional ideologies. Screen two is you and your subsequent choices after viewing the work. Screen  three is the constructed present -- a microcosm of our everyday, delayed only by weeks. Multiple layers of meaning in the work -- including this statement, the screens,  and your participation -- serve to create a more community-driven media representation of ourselves. This work allows you to become a creator of your own depiction.  

The work is loosely inspired by countless hours of scrolling through navy-blue Tumblr screens, terrible Huffington Post articles, and everyone who steps in front of the work. 

There exists no dominant meaning in the work. 

Please explore and find your own.  

The work will be displayed until the middle of winter term at Carleton College in the Weitz Center for Creativity in the CAMS Lounge. 

Meeting of Dromes: Stan VanDerBeek's Moviedrome and CAMS 283's Mediadrome

The Mediadrome, a site-specific happening featuring live bands and spherical video projections, was truly a spectacle. Nonetheless, the drome was not a hollow shell of awe nor a glorified light show. Through studying the historical and conceptual ideas of Stan VanDerBeek’s Moviedrome, the Mediadrome intentions finally find the words. The action of building the structure and filling it with music and visual become rooted fundamental notions in visual culture -- art as phenomenological experience, the disruption of the white cube, and discovering the ways of how we looking at art. 

Stan VanDerBeek's Moviedrome Exterior

VanDerBeeks was an experimental filmmaker, video artists, and visual theorist who constructed a geodesic dome with interiors filled with a complex display of multiple images in 16mm or on projection slides. VanDerBeeks also wrote a manifesto with the piece entitled, “Culture Intercom, A Proposal and Manifesto”. VanDerBeek states, “it is imperative that we [the world’s artists] invent a new world language, that we invent a non-verbal international picture-language. I propose the following: The establishment of audio-visual research centers, preferably on an international scale. These centers to explore the existing audio-visual hardware. The development of new image-making devices...”. It is this notion that the Mediadrome was based. 

Mediadrome Interior 

The Mediadrome’s heart relied in it disruption of typical looking. The bands, although not an art piece, brought a crowd of typical music listeners. Each band had their fans and they flocked to the drome to see them, but the drome invited the usuals to view their bands differently. The sounds faded into the background and visuals became the star as participants titled their heads back and watched the immersive images. Our drome operated on the same ‘visual velocity’ - a continuous audiovisual flow. By combing the live music, that people flocked to behind the recreation center for, with visuals that aren’t typically associated with music shows, we forced the audience to re-imagine what live music could look like, while simultaneously challenging what arenas art can be viewed in. It also called for the viewers to view the synthesis of elements in two distinction manners, with rapt attention and a solitary gaze. In other words, at times the visuals interacted with the music in a way that called for a connection to be made and more focused attention, while at other times the visual were clearly the central point (during breaks). 

Stan VanDerBeek's Moviedrome Interior 

Mediadrome

VanDerBeek imagined his drome as a global village that would be linked with other dromes everywhere. Essentially, he wanted an international system of dromes bound together by the media inside. It is a noble idea for VanDerBeek, but also ambitious. Our drome will have some similar notions of connectedness in that we hope to share our drome plans with other schools and collected video from inside their dromes to become material for ours. In a sense, we become the mother-drome and our offspring are literally reflected inside of us. 

The Moviedrome and Mediadrome both share fundamental art making notions. The Moviedrome, while not in mind during our creation, can help us think of ways to understand viewer experience. We can have a historical basis when we destroy the notion of the white cube and rectangular frame. It is as if VanDerBeek is our true ally in creating a new sense of dynamics in art: motion and space. Even though there are principles of VanDerBeek's that differ from our creation, they both seem to be cut from the same idealistic.