WORKS IN PROGRESS

 

A series of cultural artifacts of the present:

 

I. A series of diagrammatic/interactive visualizations of 5-minute live stream data captures of the entire Twitter network tagging @realDonaldTrump on:

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1.)  June 14, 2020, Donald Trump's birthday, Flag Day (above).

2.)  October 2, 2020, the day Donald Trump announces on Twitter he has been diagnosed with Covid.

3.)  November 7, 2020 the day Donald Trump is declared by the media to have lost the election.

4.) January 8, 2020, the day Twitter bans Donald Trump's user account, two days after the insurrection at the United States Capitol.

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II. In the Name of the Public (Five Minutes of @JoeBiden and @realDonaldTrump Passing in Front of the Statue of Liberty at Noon on Election Day, November 3, 2020), 3 hours 45 minutes, 2,607 media across 20,886 captured tweets, 59.94 fps UHD video, 2021 

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1.)  As foreground, a programmatically generated video scroll of all the media acquired from a 5-minute data capture of Twitter's entire network tagging Joe Biden or Donald Trump's user accounts across the mean time for noon in the continental United States.  Each photographic or video media will be paired with the text from a corresponding Tweet, emojis included, matching to that particular media's post.  The 2,607 individual media appearing across 20,886 Tweets will be sized in mathematical relation to their respective quantity of appearances within the 5 minutes.  The scroll's duration will match the length of the fictional day in front of the Statue of Liberty, described below.

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2.)  As background, a fictional day 3 hour 45 minute day in front of the Statue of Liberty constructed from a 27-hour, midnight East Coast to midnight West Coast, livestream webcam capture of the Statue of Liberty on Election Day, November 3, 2020.  The fictionalized day will start at midnight, proceed through sunrise, morning, afternoon, sunset, and end at midnight.

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The works consider the present state of social media production, which finds itself blurred between aggregations of financed media power and individuated perspectives.  For me, the video work captured in front of the Statue of Liberty pushes forward a contemplation of idealist conceptions of liberty with respect to how they measure up in the present.  Further, I believe the video's relation to Warhol's Empire emphasizes a distanced, digitally compressed, fragmented representation of material reality whereby the recording device no longer needs to be physically present in front of the object of representation.