Artwork By Shalom Gorewitz Artist’s statement: Hidden Revelations  “Vision begins with a fault in this world’s smooth facade.” -Howard Nemerov I’m staring at a blank wall.  There is a window in between.  I am inside looking out. I’m staring at a television set.  There is a screen in between.  I am outside looking in. I’m moving my eyes from the keyboard to computer screen and back.  Peripheral vision shows surroundings.  I am simultaneously inside and out. My eyes are closed and I’m painting.  I’m neither inside or out. The painter is always making decisions about how much to cover and leave uncovered. Each mark has some level of transparency.  Form or nothingness, gestures given and withheld. There are shades of every color except black and white.  All pictures share the foundations of foreground, background, above, below, seen, unseen. Painting is always about layering.  Figurative or abstract, there is only the illusion created by strokes of color. “Why are black and white not part of the color chart?” asked Wittgenstein.  Why are they considered color at all?  …

Artwork By Kasia Ozga Artist’s Statement: Non-EU immigrants to France seeking long-term residency permits are required to obtain x-rays in order to be cleared for processing. Every day, the government asserts its right to peer into and catalogue the innermost parts of our bodies, in order to determine who gets to stay within its borders and who is unfit to remain. The works explore how our identities are formed as we pass through and reflect on the many borders, physical as well as mental, that we have each crossed in the past and must cross on a daily basis. In the x-ray images, the physical site of transit is inscribed within the body, rather than something that we pass through unharmed. The experience of passing from one area to another stays with the migrant, and becomes part of how he experiences the world. The works’ ambiguity underscores the dual symbolism of the border as a barrier and as a springboard, simultaneously inhibiting and enabling interactions between individuals and select geographic locations. Frontière interne I consists of …

Artwork By Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz and Anton Hand (RUST LTD.) Bullet Hell (2012) is a side-scrolling 2D game in which the user controls the movement of a bullet. As with games like Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack, the object of the game is to prolong gameplay by avoiding collisions with the surrounding environment, and as gameplay progresses the game stage moves faster and faster until the user inevitably “fails” or “dies”. The game is driven by a core loop that revolves around a central decision point: should the user intervene and move the bullet? If the bullet is not moved, it will strike its target and then the game will rewind to the beginning and automatically begin again. This means that the game will loop indefinitely in the absence of user interaction, allowing users and spectators alike to approach the work as they would an animation or video installation. Thus, Bullet Hell explores the artistic potential of a popular game genre by removing its familiar feedback mechanisms—such as score, lives, music, and interface—and foregrounding its eternal recurrence …

Erin Johnson Artist’s Statement: Over the past few years, I have worked with Morse Code operators in Marin County, California, whose sea-side station was shut down in 1999 when commercial telegraphy was officially taken off the air. In 2009, the operators re-opened the doors to the closed station and started sending out messages, but this time there were few or no listeners to receive them. When asked why they continued, even when no ships were calling in, one operator observed, “Even if there were no ships out there, we’d be keeping the faith.” My relationship with the Marin County Morse Code operators began when I started researching the notion of “faith” in connection with Morse Code and communication technology. I arrived at the 1859 publication of the Spiritual Telegraph, a weekly journal, whose title points to the entanglement of the telegraph’s history with that of Spiritualism. The Spiritualist Church was founded in 1848 by Leah, Margaret and Kate Fox when they claimed that the ability to speak with the dead, through mediums, was justified by …

Paul Qaysi “Misprints” investigates the effect of destruction, trauma, and memory through deliberately accidental printing. Photojournalism ‘represents’ casualties of war; they refer to an actual event. Misprints suppress the literal, and ‘present’ destruction and the meaning of loss of life which is reconstructed in afterthoughts, how we think about it over time. In my first series of “Misprints,” I researched, and organized stories about civilian and American causalities of the Iraq War, that’s documented in hundreds of photographs, news outlets, and Iraqi/American blogs. The photographs I use are mostly in the public domain since they are works of the United States Government that are excluded from copyright law, while a few others, are under fair usage copyright for the progress of useful arts. The collected photographs are assembled on “Study Sheets” organized by names, location, and dates of the incidents and classified by generic types—civilian, soldiers, IED road explosion, house/building explosion, and so on. I cull these widely distributed photographs and print them on the wrong side of inkjet transparency film which is then presented …

Clint Enns Artist’s Statement: Prepare to Qualify is a short video that was made on a circuit-bent Atari using Namco’s classic 1982 video game Pole Position as source material. For those unfamiliar, circuit-bending is the creative re-wiring (and short-circuiting) of low voltage electronic devices such as children’s toys and small digital synthesizers. Circuit bending is often used by artists to create new musical instruments and/or to generate new images and sounds. This video is an attempt to explore the use of video games as source material–machinima–both thematically and materially. The playful re-contextualization of images from Pole Position and its opening line allow the video itself to comment on the ever-growing artistic potentials of this fresh found footage source. Re-contextualizing these images–or in this case, re-wiring the game console–ultimately allows us to conquer these games and their images. Dir. Clint Enns, “Prepare to Qualify,” USA, 3 mins., Video, 2008.

Walter Forsberg Artist’s Statement: I began to think very seriously about the historical longevity of video test patterns while managing the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s XFR STN – an open-door, artist-centered media conservation laboratory that ran for 3 months in the summer of 2013. There, I provided countless explanations to the public, who passed daily through the fifth floor gallery’s video digitization workstations, as to how the color bars were merely a representational electromagnetic language about voltages. I wondered how an image so iconic as the SMPTE split-field bars would live on beyond the technological obsolescence of standard definition analog video. Translating these voltage values into filmic form seemed immediately logical, especially once Kodak discontinued its color reversal film stocks in late 2012. This occurred to me as one strategy to preserve standard definition video beyond the lifespan of its own magnetic media format. A light leak on my Bolex’s daylight spool makes for the pretty “dropout” flash in the magenta region, and rendering the 80% gray bar as a filmed 18 gray card is supposed …

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Carla Herrera-Prats Historias Oficiales—Official Stories Exhibited at la Celda Contemporanea, Mexico City, August–October 2006 Official Stories was originally an installation of archival material intended as an inquiry into the transformation of the Mexican government’s political investment in pre-Hispanic iconography and history. Two timelines charted the contemporary fate of nationalist symbols that have helped support Mexico’s identification with its pre-colonial past. I am interested in this nationalist identification at a time when the requirements of globalization upon developing countries have turned allegiance in historical and geographical territories into both a burden for development and an economical investment. Using materials from almost 20 libraries and museums from Mexico and the US,1 this project focused on the contradictory institutional/governmental administration of imagery through two cultural practices: on the one hand, the historiography of pre-Hispanic civilization in public school textbooks, and, on the other, globe-trotting government- sponsored exhibitions of pre-Hispanic artifacts. These first images correspond to the installation of this project at La Celda …