Tiny Funny Big and Sad: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy extract

tiny, funny, big and sad

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Editors Marie-Anne McQuay, Michael Connor

Catalogue and DVD published by The British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street London W1T 1LN Tel.: (020) 7255 1444 www.bfi.org.uk First published 2007

ISBN 1-84457-224-2 978-1-84457-224-3

Copyright Š 2007, BFI, the artists, the writers and photographers All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

The copyright proprietor has licensed the enclosed DVD (including its soundtrack) for private home use only.

All other rights are reserved. Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, exhibition, public performance or broadcast of this DVD, or part thereof, is prohibited.

Your attention is drawn to the warning at the start of the DVD. Copyright Š 2007 BFI UK | 2007 | colour | PAL | ratio 4:3 + 16:9 | Language: English

tiny, funny, big and sad

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

table of contents

Acknowledgments Editor’s Note

Michael Connor p 4

Marie-Anne McQuay p 5

Another World is Possible

Michael Connor p 6

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: A Passion for Detail

Chus Martinez p 14

Illustrations p 18 Interview

Galen Joseph-Hunter p 84

Works Index p 86 Biography p 96 Credits p 100

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Acknowledgments Michael Connor ‘Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad’ marks a watershed moment for the BFI: the opening of a new gallery dedicated to artists’ film, video and new media. The gallery will present exhibitions that bridge the worlds of film and visual art, exploring the blue sky between the black box of the cinema auditorium and the white cube of the art museum. The new gallery forms a key part of the expanded programme of BFI Southbank, which includes cinema screenings, audiovisual performance, participatory projects, and archive video-on-demand, developed under the artistic direction of Eddie Berg.

For the inaugural show in this new space, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy make their London debut with a series of works that reflect on the experience of cinema-going and reinvent the role of the viewer.

Two major projects will be shown: the Traffic series (2004) and new commission The Constant World (2007). This exhibition and the opening of the new gallery have been a major undertaking for the BFI, and would not have been possible without the generosity and dedication of our partners and collaborators. The capital development of the gallery was made possible through the support of the Wolfson Foundation and Arts Council England. The Arts Council also contributed to the exhibition, tour and catalogue. The Constant World was realised through a contribution from the Henry Moore Foundation. The works in the Traffic series are included in this exhibition thanks to a loan from the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), through the graciousness and efficiency of the MUDAM registrar, David Brognon. Thanks are also due to our touring partner, VIVID (Birmingham, UK).

A special thanks goes to Magda Sawon of Postmasters Gallery, for her ongoing support on all areas of this project, and to Guy Bärtschi of Galerie Guy Bärtschi . Thanks to Rachel Wang and Mark Currie of Chocolate Films for creating a fantastic education project for the exhibition, and for producing the DVD; to Nick Lawrenson, project manager of the installation; editor Marie-Anne McQuay and designer Alan Ward of Axis Graphic Design, who put together this publication with great care and attention to detail; and Chus Martinez and Galen Joseph-Hunter for their contributions to this catalogue. Thanks to Sabine Himmelsbach of Edith-Russ Haus für Medien Kunst and Susan Joyce of Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles, for contributing their time and energy to the video documentation for the DVD. A special thanks goes to my exhibitions team colleagues, Sophie Djian and Dominic Simmons, for their dedication and hard work, and to Lauren Cornell for her support. Across the BFI, dozens of individuals – too many to name here – contributed their time and expertise to this project, and to each of them I extend a heartfelt thanks.

Finally, I would like to thank Jennifer and Kevin McCoy for their dedication to this exhibition through a year and a half of ups and downs, false starts and (ever so slightly) panicked text messages.

I would like to thank them for their lateral associations and for conversations that ranged from the aura of JPEG images to the pleasures of the 1985 Tom Cruise vehicle Legend. I would like to thank them for being the first, and for doing it with style.

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Editor’s Note Marie-Anne McQuay This catalogue offers a unique insight into the world of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, a collaborative partnership that began in the early 1990s. Best known for their model sets filmed by tiny robotic cameras, the artists use their relationship as raw material for their work. At the same time they sample from popular culture, computer software, avant-garde manifestos and linguistic theory to produce strange juxtapositions where childhood memories blend with fantasy and autobiographical moments intermingle with cinematic episodes. As a consequence, their artworks do not offer simple representations of their personal lives but make us question how we understand what we see, how we store and recall this information, and how memory is associated with particular images and sounds.

‘Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad’ presents the newly commissioned hanging sculpture The Constant World (2007), a vision of a utopian cityscape in which film noir narratives are played out, alongside Traffic (2004), a multiple platform work which features the artists as miniature spectators within their own installation. The seamless illusion so common to contemporary video installation is laid bare by the artists as they display the set, the cables, cameras, lighting and computer hardware as part of the work. The viewer is asked to map between these elements and play an active role in generating meaning. The McCoys do not, however, deny us the pleasure of experiencing illusion, they only intend to make us question our willingness to suspend disbelief and passively consume images.

The essays by Michael Connor and Chus Martinez in this publication expand on the themes of perception and association that are played out in this exhibition. Connor situates their work in relation to the legacies of video pioneers who experimented with installation as a way of undermining conventional viewer/screen relationships. He also discusses how the artists call attention to the role cinema plays in constructing narratives for our own lives; in Traffic we watch the artists as they watch films, an act that brings into question the roles of author, audience and image in the work. Martinez, by contrast, deals with the psychological impact of images, how we deal with them in the initial moment of cognition and their impact on memory itself. Her overview of the McCoys’ practice illuminates how their use of technology corresponds with the multiple realities that we encounter in the twenty-first century as we move between physical and virtual worlds.

The McCoys’ work is also strongly associated with the use of the index and the database as conceptual tools. For example, in Every Shot, Every Episode (2001) the artists classify more than 10,000 shots from the original Starsky & Hutch television series, removing them from narrative contexts and making them searchable under new criteria such as ‘every sexy outfit’. In keeping with their approach, we have produced an inventory of all works to date, covering installations, sculptures, performances, video and web-based projects from 1993 to 2007. The catalogue does not intend to give a single authoritative view of their work, since that would be at odds with artists who seek to undermine definitive histories. Instead it enables the reader to map the development of a practice and make their own associations between new and older works. As such, it is not a full stop but an active pause in the artists’ ongoing and ever-changing creative processes.

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Another World is Possible

michael connor

You’re watching a film, or reading a novel. There’s a moment in the story where the protagonist enters a cinema. Maybe it’s a moment of escape, as she runs from a problem: She lit a cigarette, glad of the darkness but not protected by it; and she watched the screen, but all she saw were the extraordinarily unconvincing wiggles of a girl whose name, incredibly enough, appeared to be Doris Day. She thought, irrelevantly, I should never come to movies, I can’t stand them, and then she began to cry. 1 Maybe he’s there because he’s homeless in Manhattan, drowning in anomie, and the real estate of a cinema seat is worth the price of admission: It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o’clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. 2 Or maybe his emotional or physical state doesn’t drown out the story of the film. Maybe the character in the auditorium finds his unspoken thoughts reflected in the narrative on-screen, or even appears in it as an actor: As he delivered his one line – ‘Nom de Dieu, que j’ai soif!’ – the camera shifted to show him framed in the sights of an enemy gun; blood suddenly bubbled from Eric’s lips and he went sliding off the rooftop, out of sight. With Eric’s death, the movie also died for them, and, luckily, very shortly, it was over. They walked out of the cool darkness into the oven of July.

‘Who’s going to buy me that drink?’ Eric asked. He smiled a pale smile. It was something of a shock to see him, standing on the sidewalk, shorter than he had appeared in the film, in flesh and blood. 3 The cinema auditorium plays an important role in Western literature, art and theatre. It represents a place of escape, a place where characters seek self-reflection and tune into their emotional lives.

Deep-seated thoughts tend to rise to the surface of our consciousness when we move into the role 1 James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Vintage International, 1992), p. 283.

2 Ibid., p. 3.

3 Ibid., pp. 330-1.

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of spectator; we are not simply fixated on an exterior image. Viewing creates multiple selves, located across the spaces of the screen, the auditorium and our interior lives. In the exhibition 'Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad', Jennifer and Kevin McCoy present works that draw on a variety of traditions within both film and art history to explore the latent creative possibilities inherent in the role of the viewer.

The Traffic series (2004), consisting of four works shown together in the exhibition, marks an important stage in the McCoys’ exploration of spectatorship. Each of the works in the series depicts moments in the artists’ lives in which their memory of a particular period is linked to watching a specific film. The artists have restaged these memories as miniature dioramas, installed on tables in the gallery space. These miniature tableaux feature landscape, architecture and human forms represented at small scale, using materials from model railroading hobby kits as well as bespoke hand-crafted elements. These sculptures are surrounded by flexible metal limbs, some supporting lighting fixtures and others supporting small video cameras. Each camera captures a live video image of its subject and sends it to a computerised video switcher. The computer stitches together an endlessly looping sequence of these camera shots according to a preset pattern programmed by the artists. This video loop is then projected on the gallery wall. Each tabletop sculpture therefore functions as an automated film set, producing a video sequence in real time.

Two narrative spaces exist within each piece: one, the viewing space, in which the McCoys depict themselves in the act of watching a movie, and two, the ‘set’ of the film they are watching, remade by the artists at small scale. The first work in the series, Traffic #1: Our Second Date, depicts two characters in a cinema auditorium with plush seating and red curtains. The female character is a brunette with shoulder-length hair, wearing the kind of classic style that suggests that it might be Jennifer – but Kevin is the clincher. With thick black-framed glasses, handlebar moustache and longish wavy hair, he has a look (at the time of writing) that’s recognisable even when he’s six inches tall. Appearing on the scaled-down cinema screen is a live video feed from the other narrative space of the miniature tableau: a re-creation of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967). 4 As in the original film, the camera moves slowly alongside an interminable column of small-scale cars, stuck in an endlessly looping traffic jam caused by a deadly accident.

The three further works in the Traffic series follow this format too; each depicts the artists as they watch a film. But in these works the artists have left the allusive cinema auditorium for the hybrid spaces of television viewing. In Traffic #2: At Home, Jennifer and Kevin are shown in their apartment.

We see a floral-print sofa, lace curtains, a vase of flowers and a 70s-style television. The artists watch the tiny screen, which shows a parade in a Western US town, with police patrol cars at the head. This is a recreation of Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974) , 5 in which a fugitive couple make a madcap dash across Texas in an attempt to rescue their biological child from his foster parents.

Drama is introduced into the series with Traffic #3: In the Cardiac Ward. The character of Kevin is shown here sitting upright in a hospital bed, with Jennifer seated next to him. The space is anonymous, but the title of the piece implies a personal narrative, the trauma of going to the hospital, and the boredom of staying there. Playing on a standard issue hospital TV is another short video loop, this time a recreation of American Graffiti (1973): roadsters and Cadillacs cruise the main drag of a 50s-

4 Jean-Luc Godard (Director), Week End [motion picture] (France/Italy: Comacico, Lira Films, Cinecidi, 1967). Retrieved from http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/57369 (12 September 2006).

5 Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown (Producers) and Steven Spielberg (Director), The Sugarland Express [motion picture] (USA: Universal Pictures, 1974). Retrieved from http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/52217 (12 September 2006).

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style American small town. 6 In the fourth piece, Traffic #4: At the Bar, the McCoys are shown in a wood-panelled watering hole, watching a movie on TV: a chase scene from Bonnie & Clyde (1967). 7 Appropriately for a project called Traffic, each of the works in this series deals with a film scene in which cars play a central role. It’s not quite as obvious how the selection of film titles might have resonated with events in Jennifer and Kevin’s lives, if at all. What is the connection between American Graffiti, for example, and a cardiac ward? Perhaps the cruising teenagers represent a form of escape from the confinement of the hospital bed: the viewer can only guess. For their part, the McCoys give few hints to suggest that such intertextuality exists, presenting the work in purely biographical terms, leading the viewer to draw their own conclusions. On the McCoys’ website, Kevin has written a caption: ‘[In the Cardiac Ward] tells the story of Jenn and I watching a scene from American Graffiti while I was in the hospital in 2003.’ 8 Whilst Kevin’s description does not specifically suggest a connection between this moment in the McCoys’ lives, and the stop-start flow of automobile traffic, his statement does suggest that this significant moment, and the McCoys’ memory of it, is now linked to watching that film.

The McCoys’ self-portraits as couch-potatoes stand in absurd contrast to the illustrious stories behind the most well-known self-portraits of modern times. By taking the artist as the subject of a work, the self-portrait has often been positioned as a way for the public to access the semi-mythical world of the artist who made it. Van Gogh’s missing ear, Frida Kahlo’s monkey and Tracey Emin’s bed all appear in such works as fetish objects that stand in for the adventures and trials of the artist: madness, new world Trotskyism, overt female sexuality. Where these artists are celebrated and remembered for bravely giving voice to untravelled boundaries of human experience, the McCoys’ portraits remain expressly within the comfort zone of consumer culture. The couple live and work in New York, and their external appearances give no clue of a difference between them and the elite class of that city: they are white, heterosexual and able-bodied. In relation to the figures on their screen, the McCoys identify as ‘same’ rather than ‘other’. If the small screen in Traffic #4, for example, was a half-silvered mirror, one might expect the McCoys to see a faint image of Kevin superimposed over Clyde/Warren Beatty, and a chimeric synthesis of Jennifer, Bonnie and Faye Dunaway. This synthesis of viewing subject and image on-screen parallels the artists’ chosen method of representation: ready-made, mass-produced plastic figurines purchased from an ordinary hobby supply store are customised to resemble the artists more closely. The ‘selves’ in these portraits are both off-the-shelf and self-made.

Yet, the way the McCoys present their experiences of spectatorship leads one to assume that there is more going on than the simple synthesis of viewer and on-screen narrative. The act of viewing is not simply the reception of a message, but a complex play of experiences and factors that come together within the viewer to construct a conversation around a given scenario.

Alone in a crowd is never so intense as at the movies, and never so open to sudden dislocation.

It is the complex play between me, you, them, the film, the cinema building and the world outside that enables us, on occasion, to experience reality more completely, and as in dreams to see in the dark. 9 6 Francis Ford Coppola (Producer) and George Lucas (Director), American Graffiti [motion picture] (USA: Universal Pictures, 1973).

Retrieved from http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/44298 (11 September 2006).

7 Warren Beatty (Producer) and Arthur Penn (Director), Bonnie & Clyde [motion picture] (USA: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1967).

Retrieved from http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/27201 (12 September 2006).

8 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccoyspace/sets/124344 (retrieved 4 September 2006).

9 Ian Breakwell and Paul Hammond (ed.), Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990).

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The McCoys’ reconstructions of the act of viewing synthesise events on the screen, their immediate surroundings, their companions, the wider context of their personal lives, maybe even what they had for dinner. For the Jennifer we see in Our Second Date, Week End isn’t simply a monument carved in celluloid, it’s also a blossoming romance, a memory of Kevin in his twenties, studying abroad, a Parisian fleapit, a baguette and a glass of red wine. For the Kevin of In the Cardiac Ward, American Graffiti is uncertain diagnosis, hospital-ward food, a new prescription, and intimacy in a moment of fear. Through this confluence of perceptions, the viewer, as much as the film-maker, produces the meaning of a movie. In Traffic, the spectator is a productive role, and viewing is an artist's act.

Traffic reflects not only on the McCoys’ roles as artists/viewers, but also implicates the viewer in the gallery. Like a Hollywood sound stage, the illusion of the miniature film sets in Traffic have marked boundaries. The mobile viewer can see lighting fixtures, the edge of the set and the back of the stage flats. The fixed point of view of the cameras, however, places this apparatus beyond the edge of the frame, leaving the artifice intact, except for one element: the viewer in the gallery. Upon taking a closer look at the sculptural element of the piece, one might see oneself appear (fleetingly, badly lit and out of focus) in the background of a video image on the screen. This accidental cameo confirms the ‘liveness’ of the piece, connecting the image on the screen directly to the reality before us, rather than to an abstract, pre-recorded space generated by a computer or Hollywood film set.

The image and its physical referent are reunified.

The appearance of one’s own image on-screen does more than simply confirm the liveness of the piece. It transforms the work from the artists’ self-portrait into a viewer’s self-portrait, transforms immediate experience into mediated experience, transforms action into acting. Traffic induces the condition of ‘doubling’, a word used by curator Sarah Cook to explain certain effects of media technologies on the reception of artwork. She proposes that technology doubles one’s existence, making one stand outside of oneself, outside of events as they happen. 10 Picture yourself making a home video, for example, of a holiday. While watching a sunset, you focus on an LCD screen, adjusting the camera’s settings. Perhaps you keep up a running commentary, communicating with friends back home rather than those immediately around you: ‘and here’s so-and-so, drinking her cocktail, and this is the view out the window, and this is the sunset’. You move into a mental space between the events as they are happening and events as they will be narrated to viewers in the future. Doubling creates the distance between the self in the moment and the self on-screen.

This distance is invoked in the Traffic series by capturing live video images of viewers in the gallery, turning the curious onlooker into an unwitting on-screen subject. Whilst the video represents miniatures as if they are life-size, it depicts the human visitor to the gallery at a Brobdingnagian scale, rendering the viewer’s own image oddly unfamiliar.

Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room (1974), an important precedent for the McCoys’ use of live video in the gallery, is even more explicit in its attempt to create a distance between the viewer and their own image. In this work, the viewer enters a booth in which two video displays are installed. The displays show CCTV-like images of similarly nondescript spaces. Within moments of entering the booth, the visitor’s own image appears on one of the screens. A live video camera is trained on the booth, electronically delayed for 8 seconds (the outer limit of human short-term memory), and then displayed on the TV screen. The viewer is confronted with a portrait of themselves that has the immediacy of a live image, but which has the unfamiliarity of an image from the past.

10 Sarah Cook, ‘Curating Real-Time Presence in a Gallery Context’, VIVID, Birmingham, 30 January 2005.

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Time Delay Room, like the Traffic series, invites viewers to be makers, not just consumers, of images: each viewer is also an artist. The McCoys’ work explores the concomitant idea of the artist-asviewer. The artist’s role is not just to make images, but also to consume them. This is evident in their tour-de-force of obsessive viewing, Every Shot, Every Episode (2001). The piece was inspired

by Kevin’s childhood babysitter, ‘who taped Starsky & Hutch television shows with an audio tape recorder while describing the visual events as she watched.’ 11 For their re-working of this impulse to narrate-while-viewing, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy put together a collection of 20 episodes of the Starsky & Hutch TV series. 12 The McCoys broke the series up into 10,000 individual shots, assigning keywords that described characteristics, actions, people or objects within the image: suburbs, clocks, stairways, brown, sports facilities, female cops. Individual shots relating to each category were compiled onto discs, each one carefully labelled. For example, visitors to the gallery could select a video CD, and view on a monitor, in quick succession, every image of a female cop from Starsky & Hutch. The result is a dynamic re-reading of Starsky & Hutch that excavates hidden associations, creates new visual rhythms, and highlights implicit ideologies.

As our aforementioned holiday video-maker is bound to discover, the world cannot be perfectly narrated. The narration of an event introduces error, interpretation and noise; each narration conjures up a parallel vision of the world. If the experiment of Every Shot, Every Episode were to be repeated, different results would be obtained each time. As Albert Einstein is alleged to have remarked, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. In Einstein’s universe, mathematical formulae predict the movement of atoms and objects to an extraordinarily precise degree. In the McCoys’ universe, by contrast, experiments are conducted in the hope of new failures; results can never be exactly recreated from moment to moment or from viewer to viewer.

At the time of writing, the McCoys are producing a new installation that conjures a failed vision of another possible universe. The Constant World (2007) is a hanging sculpture based in part on the work of another model-making artist, Constant Nieuwenhuys. Between 1956 and 1974, Constant created a series of drawings and models for a visionary city called New Babylon. New Babylon proposed a ‘camp for nomads on a planetary scale’, 13 a space where people move freely between temporary habitats that would adapt to meet their physical and emotional needs. The press of a button could change the texture, material, temperature or colour of a room, simply to suit one’s mood.

The McCoys’ new project uses a cityscape modelled after New Babylon as the backdrop for a story based on Jean-Luc Godard’s sci-fi film noir Alphaville (1965). 14 Using a technique similar to the Traffic works, the McCoys create an on-screen narrative that inter-cuts these bygone visions of the future with texts emblazoned across the screen. The texts act as marketing slogans that lure visitors to this inaccessible terrain.

Constant’s dream of an environment that could be altered at the press of a button has never really come true – except in the world of the screen. With network technology, on-screen social spaces now offer some of the interactive promise of New Babylon. Online games and social networking 11 http://www.mccoyspace.com/esee.html (retrieved 12 September 2006).

12 The original series ran from 1975–79, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072567/ (retrieved 6 September 2006).

13 http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html (retrieved 27 October 2006).

14 André Michelin (Producer) and Jean-Luc Godard (Director), Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution [motion picture] (France/Italy: Chaumiane Productions, Filmstudio, 1965). Retrieved from http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/131840 (30 October 2006).

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sites allow users to create their own fully personalised and environments, creating spaces that are audiovisual expressions of a user's identity. Image, sound and text may be changed at the press of a button to reflect changes in taste and mood. As in New Babylon, creative expression is a fundamental part of social interaction, and all members of the community are both creators and consumers of culture. For some users, this may mean creating extravagant page designs with custom-made animations, dance tracks that play in the background, videos that play on a loop.

Not everyone goes to such extremes, but there is one act of self-expression that figures into nearly every form of online community: list-making. When creating their online ‘profile’, users of social networking sites are asked to list their favourite movies, music and TV shows. Drawing up such a list is an enormously difficult task. If you’re trying to express a belonging to a group, and attract and impress others online, what you like is more important than what you are like. One of my friends on a social networking site assembled the following list of favourites: les amants du pont neuf, dr.zhivago, time bandits, the knack, smashing time, music of chance, petulia, run lola run, mystery train, a bout de souffle, stroszek, aguirre: the wrath of god, manhattan [sic]. 15 This list runs the gamut from cult to classic, new wave to indie, suggesting cultural savvy and a certain kind of hipness. In this context, the title of a film is a building block to be used in the construction of an online identity.

The work of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy consistently refers to the viewer as a producer of meaning, an idea that has contemporary significance and historical roots. At least as far back as 1934, cinemagoers have been aware that a less than artful film could still resonate unexpectedly with a viewer in a certain context, and yield unexpected rewards through creative readings. When the original King Kong (1933) came out, Jean Ferry wrote that he had ‘definitely given up the idea of seeing a poetic film’ until he saw the blockbuster tale of the giant ape.

What gives this film value in my eyes is not at all the work of the producers and directors ... but what flows naturally from the involuntary liberation of elements in themselves heavy with oneiric power. 16 Kong strikes a chord with Ferry in the form of a childhood fear of apes. The poetry of the film lies in the deep-seated associations Ferry conjures within it, much as American Graffiti is connected to the cardiac ward, and Starsky & Hutch to Kevin’s childhood babysitter. In the words of Surrealist writer Georges Legrand, ‘Nobody sees the same film.’ 17 He could equally have said, ‘Nobody sees the same film twice.’ This is the theory of Cinematic Relativity. You, the viewer: you can only ever achieve a particular glimpse of an image on-screen, from a particular vantage point, at a particular moment in time. The moment passes as quickly as it arrives. It will never come again. You, the viewer: each image on the screen allows you to conjure a new possibility and an alternate world.

Remember this. Another world is possible.

15 http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=61662025 (retrieved 13 October 2006).

16 First published as Jean Levy, ‘King-Kong’, Minotaure (Paris, 1934) 5: 5. Reprinted in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow & Its Shadow: Surrealist writings on the cinema (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), p. 162.

17 Quoted in Paul Hammond, The Shadow & Its Shadow: Surrealist writings on the cinema (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), p. 29.

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The Constant World

The Constant World 19

The Constant World

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The Constant World (detail)

The Constant World (detail)

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The Constant World (detail)

The Constant World (detail)

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The Constant World (detail)

The Constant World (detail)

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The Constant World (detail)

The Constant World (detail)

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The Constant World

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Traffic Series

Traffic #1: Our Second Date

Traffic #3: In the Cardiac Ward (detail) >

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Traffic #2: At Home

Traffic (overview) < Traffic #2: At Home (detail)

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Double Fantasy IV (God)

Other Works 34

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Double Fantasy IV (God) (detail)

Double Fantasy IV (God) (detail)

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Double Fantasy IV (God)

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Dream Sequence (detail)

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Dream Sequence (detail)

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Dream Sequence (detail)

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Scary Things I

Scary Things I (detail)

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Special Things (detail)

Special Things (detail)

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Special Things

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Clouds #4 UFO (detail)

Clouds #3 Astronaut (detail)

Clouds #4 UFO

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Our First Date (detail)

Our First Date (detail)

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What Do You Think?

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How We Met

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How We Met (detail)

How We Met (detail)

How We Met (detail)

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I Number the Stars (detail)

I Number the Stars

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I Number the Stars (detail)

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Eternal Return (detail)

section title

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Eternal Return

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Interview

Galen Joseph-Hunter is Assistant Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), a leading nonprofit resource for video art and interactive media, founded in New York in 1971. This interview was conducted in October 2006 for the purpose of the EAI’s Media Resource guide. It appears here in an edited form.

Galen Joseph-Hunter, EAI: When did you begin creating in media-based artwork? What forms were you working with in the beginning, and how have they expanded, or become more focused?

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: We have always worked with media, even before we thought of it in terms of artwork. Our earliest frames of creative reference were experimental music and film – in high school and college. When we met in Paris we were each in the process of realising that media could be a broadly integrated practice, not limited to narrower categories of film or music. This is when media became an art practice for us. Even though single-channel video was a big reference for us early on, we still had a fairly multi-faceted approach to media: giving performances, making music, taking pictures, creating installations. The challenge for us was to tackle issues of form – what form do the ideas take within a specific media framework? This is a basic art problem and one that media artists can really struggle with, given that the forms they use may be so diverse and flexible. When we look back on our work this is something that we see now: the development of form, structure and materials in relation to the ideas expressed through media.

EAI: Your work includes performance, video, net art, media installations and sculptures.

Do you tend to migrate fluidly among these different forms or do you gravitate towards particular ones?

McCoys: In general, we ask which media form is the best fit for a given idea. But there are also more practical issues. We had been doing a lot of live performance-based works, but we eventually started looking for less ephemeral forms. The same is true for interactive works – we began to see the limitations of this form. On the other hand, the work with miniatures and live cameras has really interested us over the past couple of years. We see them (and some earlier software-based video installations) as performative objects that probably extend from the early work. We keep thinking of more and more things to try with it. So our interests and antipathies guide our choice of form as much as conceptual concerns.

EAI: You seem interested in how computers transform our way of seeing and constructing narrative, and reconfiguring stories. Can you talk about this, and some of your influences?

McCoys: We are interested in contemporary forms of meaning – what counts as meaningful now, how meaning is put together, what is being said and who is saying it. Narrative plays a central

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role in this process, especially cinematic narrative. Certainly we talk about Godard a lot, and about experimental films like Stan Brakhage’s early work. But that is just one side of the coin. The other side is a functional, procedural logic that is ever-present in the world today. Early conceptual art tapped into this without a technological basis. Now this is a world of protocols, algorithms, databases and so on. How these two threads intertwine describes the world in a fundamental way now, and this is what interests us. So it is not the computer per se that is an interesting thing to consider, but rather what kind of cultural logic is at work that gives rise to the computer – or globalisation for that matter.

EAI: In Our Second Date you show the viewer how media has played a role in the development of your relationship from the beginning. How this has continued after the second date?

McCoys: Continuing the thread from the previous question, a major thread in our work has been the subjective response to media and, more specifically, our response to media. Our Second Date is an example of this. We made a series of specifically autobiographical works for a lot of reasons. We have been fascinated with the way that different realities with different time signatures co-exist between the worlds of media and actual lived experience. The cross-cutting evident in Our Second Date becomes an alternative method of dealing with this superimposition of one narrative (the slow one of real life) with the other (the edited concentrated cinematic form).

EAI: Your work has been acquired by many museums and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA. When you create the work, how much do you consider the technology you are choosing, in relation to its longevity and maintenance by the collector?

McCoys: Our instinct is to make the work as self-contained as possible and to de-emphasise the appearance of the technology. There are several reasons for this. One is to try to direct attention away from a functionalist, ‘gee-whiz’ reading of the work – a potential hazard if people are approaching it as a new media work. Of course, it's not our goal to make work that needs constant repair, but on the other hand, every project seems to require new untested innovations and we often don’t know until after several exhibitions where the weak spots are going to be.

EAI: How do you deal with all the variables in your work when it comes to installing it in museums and collections? Do you insist on being present to install, or do you provide schematics and detailed instructions? If the latter, could you describe those guidelines? (Such as specifying the dimensions of projections, restricting light and sound sources from being adjacent to your installations, and minimum space requirements.)

McCoys: It’s just as you outlined. It’s best if we can install the work personally in that you can not document every eventuality, but listing the kinds of things you mention above is helpful. We also try to provide specifications of the parts used so that they can be replaced if needed. It’s also interesting, particularly with the early work, to try to locate the conceptual heart of the projects.

Then, if in twenty years a completely new innovation in technology takes hold, it is clear to the institution or collection what aspect of the work might be okay to upgrade (like a better monitor) and what might go too far and compromise the idea of the work.

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Works Index

A list of all major works produced by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy between 1993 and 2007.

2007

The Constant World

pp. 19–26

Installation with flat-screen display; custom videosequencing software; hanging sculpture with miniature elements, lighting, live video cameras.

The Constant World consists of a large interconnected series of ceiling-mounted metal spheres, models and lights. The miniature elements depict a film noir melodrama based on the dystopian technological noir of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), set in an urban environment modelled after Constant Nieuwenhuis’ concept for the utopian city New Babylon. Textual elements are incorporated into these vignettes, which are captured by 36 live video cameras. The video images are sequenced by computer software into an on-screen narrative with texts super-imposed on the screen like advertising slogans.

shots of the tableau which are sequenced by computer into an endlessly looping live video, projected as part of the installation.

Dream Sequence

pp. 38–41

Installation with video projection; kinetic sculpture with miniature elements, lighting, live video cameras, mirrors; audio.

A large two-sided wheel that is set at a forty-five degree angle rotates slowly on its axis. The wheel is covered with miniature elements depicting dream-like imagery.

Next to the rotating wheel, two miniature figurines representing the artists are lying asleep in twin beds.

In front of each bed is a half-silvered mirror, partially reflecting the slowly moving dream images, and partially transmitting an image of the artists. A video camera is trained on each character, showing a composite of the sleeping figure and a translucent reflection of their dream imagery. Live video feeds from each camera are presented as a two-channel projection.

2006

Double Fantasy II (Sex) Double Fantasy III (Career) Double Fantasy IV (God)

pp. 34–37

Installation with video projection; custom videosequencing software; sculpture with miniature elements, metal stand, lighting, live video cameras; audio.

A series of works in which the artists, portrayed as adolescents in a miniature tableau, imagine their future adult lives. Each work in the series explores a particular theme: sex, career and religion. The sculpture consists of a vertically oriented platform mounted on a floor-based stand. Miniature elements, lighting and cameras are mounted on either side of the platform. Cameras capture

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Scary Things I and II

p. 42

Installation with flat-screen display; table-mounted sculptures with miniature elements and acrylic lettering, lighting, live video cameras; custom video-sequencing software.

Scary Things is made of images of the simple elements of nature that can be frightening to children. This sculpture (like Special Things) uses the technique of live cameras, sculptural miniatures, and acrylic text in one integrated platform. Although the sculpture contains only ten words, hundreds of sentences are created by a softwarebased video sequencer, forming a poetry which sets image against text: ‘Dogs are fighting scary things’ or ‘Lost birds are scary’.

Special Things

pp. 43–45

Installation with flat-screen display; custom videosequencing software; hanging sculptures with miniature elements, acrylic lettering, live video cameras; audio.

Special Things presents images of a utopian childhood, complete with cavorting lambs and chiffon rainbows.

These are rendered in fragments across sixteen small hanging sculptures. Each consists of a miniature scene, a small video camera, and a mirrored word emblazoned across the front of the sculpture. On a nearby screen, images of the sixteen scenes and their related captions are rapidly intercut by video sequencing software in an ever-changing pattern created by a computer algorithm.

As the sequence of the words changes, the piece creates new sentences and shifts meaning between text and image: ‘The children feel special today’ or ‘You can smell the flowers’.

2005

Cloud Series pp. 46–47 #1 (man) #2 (woman) #3 (astronaut) #4 (UFO) #5 (diver) #6 (sheep) #7 (cameraman) #8 (airport) #9 (priest) #10 (refugees) #11 (trees) Wall-mounted kinetic sculpture with miniatures and live video camera; custom video-sequencing software; small LCD screen.

A series of miniature works inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalent Series (1922–35), a photographic study of clouds as pure pattern. In each work, a cloud formation is fashioned from cotton wool and other materials and affixed to a rotating cylinder. The cylinder is mounted to a motor, which rotates it slowly. A live video camera captures this image, which gives the appearance of clouds moving across the sky. In the foreground of the live video image, miniature figures are fixed in various aspects, differing in each piece.

Double Fantasy Installation with video projection; sculpture with miniature elements, lighting, live video cameras.

The artists are depicted in miniature as if they were childhood friends, surrounded by tiny renderings of fantasy scenarios. The miniatures are fixed to either side of a vertically oriented platform which is mounted on a floor-based stand. Live video cameras capture images

of the unmoving tableaux, which are then sequenced by custom video-sequencing software into an endlessly looping live video sequence.

Our First Date

p. 48

Installation with flat screen display; kinetic sculptures with miniature elements, live video cameras; custom video-sequencing software; audio.

Wall-mounted sculpture with four platforms. Our First Date draws on biographical material, rendering the artists in miniature as they visit a Conceptual Art exhibition in Paris. The tableau includes representations of works by artists On Kawara and Joseph Kosuth. The figures of Jennifer and Kevin are multiple and appear in different positions to indicate the passage of time. Live video cameras capture images of these tableaux, which are then edited into an endlessly looping video and displayed on the adjacent monitor. The soundtrack recreates the audio from Bruce Nauman’s Violin tuned D.E.A.D (1969), a violin playing four simple notes in succession.

What Do You Think?

p. 49

Wall-mounted sculpture with miniature elements and video cameras; small LCD screen.

In this wall-mounted piece, a group of identical miniature scientists is seated around a conference table.

Two live video cameras capture shots of the tableau, alternating between each side of the table, which are then sequenced into an endlessly looping live video.

The figures appear on screen, as if endlessly asking each other: ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’

2004

How We Met

pp. 50–51

Installation with flat-screen display; suitcase; wallmounted platforms with miniature elements, live video cameras and lighting; custom video-sequencing software.

Unique. Installed as a site-specific work at JFK Airport’s Terminal 5, and recreated in 2005 as a wall-mounted installation.

The platform shows the artists, rendered in miniature, as they reach for the same suitcase in an airport baggage reclaim area. Live video cameras feed back still shots, which are edited into a looped video sequence and displayed on a wall-mounted flat screen monitor.

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I Number the Stars

p. 52

Learning from Las Vegas

p. 57

Edition of 3 + Artist Proof

Edition of 3 + Artist Proof

Installation with suitcase; DVDs with text labels; DVD player; small LCD screen; audio.

Installation with suitcase; 120 DVDs; DVD player; small LCD screen; audio.

The first season of the original 1960s Star Trek series is broken down into a series of shots. Each shot is categorised by the artists according to a variety of keywords such as ‘events’, ‘objects’ and ‘emotions’. The clips associated with each keyword are assembled on a DVD. Each DVD is labelled with a sentence beginning with the word ‘I’ that describes an action or a state of being, such as ‘I am sick’. The DVDs are installed inside a wall-mounted open suitcase along with a DVD player and LCD screen.

This work uses as its raw material footage from 21 different films in which the city of Las Vegas is used as a setting. Each individual shot is organised according to descriptive categories and taken as a lesson learnt from or about the city of Las Vegas and its inhabitants. For example, ‘learning from fountains’ includes all shots of exuberantly erupting fountains. The installation uses a form similar to I Number the Stars.

Traffic Series pp. 27–33 #1 Our Second Date #2 At Home #3 In the Cardiac Ward #4 At the Bar Edition of 3 + Artist Proof Installation with video projection; tabletop miniature kinetic sculptures with live video cameras, lighting and small LCD screens; custom video-sequencing software; audio. Set of four.

Each of these tabletop miniature kinetic sculptures involves two linked narratives. One is a small-scale recreation of a scene from a film, such as Godard’s Week End (1967). The other is a tableau portraying models of the artists themselves seated in front of a small LCD screen: a live video feed of the cinematic recreation appears on their screen. In the gallery space, a video projection alternates between images of the artists in their viewing environment and images of the film scene they are watching. All of the films involve automobile traffic in some way.

Soft Rains pp. 58–61 #1 Beach Adventure #2 Cabaret #3 Dinner Party #4 The Loft #5 The Spa #6 Suburban Horror (set of 2) Installation with video projection; audio; table-mounted sculpture with miniature elements, lighting, live video cameras; custom video-sequencing software.

Soft Rains consists of multiple platforms. Each platform represents a familiar cinematic archetype or genre rendered in miniature (60s art house, 70s horror etc).

The miniature ‘heroine’ of the work, clad in a distinctive red dress, is pictured in each of the sets. The live feed from each video camera is connected to a computerbased video sequencer, which switches from one camera to another to create an edited sequence that is presented as a large-scale projection.

2002

448 is Enough Installation with small LCD screens; 449 video CDs with colour-coded labels; 2 video CD players; audio.

2003

Eternal Return

pp. 53–56

Installation with video projection; table-mounted kinetic sculpture with miniature elements, lighting and live video cameras; custom video-sequencing software; video projection; audio.

Eternal Return is based on The Gay Divorcee (1934) starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Miniature dancing figures, captured from multiple angles, are filmed by live video cameras which cut from one shot to another, creating a video sequence evoking the original film. The soundtrack is an excerpt of the song The Continental.

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This database project is comprised of a shot-by-shot breakdown of a single episode of the 1980s US family drama Eight Is Enough. Every individual shot is represented by a brief, colour-coded text description of the imagery it contains. These descriptions are installed, in sequence, in a grid on the gallery wall. Small monitors are placed within the installation where ad breaks occurred and show commercials from the era the original show aired.

The Band Rider Series pp. 62–63 #1 Nine Inch Nails #2 Jennifer Lopez #3 Guns N’ Roses #4 Christina Aguilera Installation with plinths; found text; readymade objects.

A collection of ‘rider agreements’, the element of a live musician’s contract in which they specify catering and hospitality requirements for their dressing rooms.

The artists assemble the various products requested

by Jennifer Lopez, Nine Inch Nails, Guns N’ Roses and Christina Aguilera. These found products are installed on plinths alongside reproductions of the artists’ rider agreements.

Every Anvil

p. 64

Edition of 3 + Artist Proof Installation with suitcase; video CDs; video CD player; small LCD screen.

The source material for this work is a collection of one hundred episodes of the Looney Tunes television programme. Each episode is broken down into a series of individual shots. The artists have assigned key words to each instance they found of violence or physical extremity: every fall, every explosion and every anvil.

Each category is archived on an individual video CD which is labelled in clear, bold lettering and installed on a shelf inside a wall-mounted suitcase, which also houses a video CD player.

Horror Chase

p. 65

How I Learned 1–4 Edition of 4 + Artist Proof Series of four installations with suitcase; shelves; video CDs with text labels; video CD player; small LCD screen; audio.

The project asks, if everything you knew came from the TV show Kung Fu (1972–75), what would you know? The original programme is broken down shot by shot. Each clip is categorised by the artists according to lessons that it might teach a viewer. The lessons fall into four categories, ‘How I Learned About Religion’, ‘How I Learned About Filmmaking’, ‘How I Learned About Society’ and ‘How I Learned About Capitalism’. The installation takes a form similar to Every Anvil.

The Kiss

p. 66

Edition of 3 + Artist Proof Installation with custom video-sequencing software; suitcase with built-in computer and LCD screen; video projection.

By re-shooting a key scene from Body Heat (1981), with actors playing the parts of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, the artists re-stage a pivotal erotic moment in the film. The re-staged scene is then broken into short clips and digitised. Custom computer software selects these clips according to ever-changing patterns, creating a continuous live remix which is projected at cinematic scale. The computer hardware is installed in a red briefcase which forms part of the installation.

Edition of 3 + Artist Proof Installation with custom video-sequencing software; suitcase with built-in computer and LCD screen; video projection.

The work is a live-action remake of a climatic chase sequence from Evil Dead II (1987). The artists re-shot the scene on a specially designed stage set. Each shot in the sequence is individually digitised. Custom computer software selects these clips at random, playing them back in a seamless but continuously variable way. The images are projected at cinematic scale and the computer hardware is installed in a black briefcase, which forms part of the installation.

2001

201: A Space Algorithm

p. 66

Interactive online software with digital video. www.mccoyspace.com/201 201: A Space Algorithm is an online software program that allows users to re-edit Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The re-edited versions compress or expand the film’s running time and synthetically generate juxtapositions between images. The user and the computer collaborate to select and sequence shots.

201: A Text Algorithm Text on paper.

A numbered list comprised of a shot-by-shot description of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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The Babysitter Tapes

p. 67

Pink Light

p. 73

Performance with television and microphone.

Interactive electronic sculpture with light and audio.

Performance in which a participant watches an episode of Starsky & Hutch that the audience cannot see. The performer describes the action and visual description of the show to the audience in as much detail as possible.

Pink Light consists of a miniature lift similar to one that might be found in a multi-storey office building. When at rest, the elevator is hidden from view beneath a false floor. When the viewer presses a call button, the lift rises to its full height of 24 inches. As it rises, its doors open, and pink light spills out as a voice recites slogans that blend metaphysics and technology.

Every Shot, Every Episode

pp. 68–71

Edition of 3 + Artist Proof Installation with suitcase; shelf; video CDs; video CD player; small LCD screen; audio speakers.

Radio Frankenstein [installation version]

The source material for this work is a collection of 10,000 shots from the original series of Starsky & Hutch.

Each episode is broken down into a series of individual shots. The artists have assigned key words to each shot: every plaid, every sexy outfit, every yellow Volkswagen, etc. There are 278 categories in total. Each category is archived on an individual video CD which is labelled in clear, bold lettering and installed in the gallery on a shelf.

Video CDs are chosen by the gallery visitor and played via the built-in video screen.

Onscreen

This DVD is presented on a laptop monitor. Onscreen is a compilation of every scene in the first season of the original Star Trek series of the crew gathering together to study a large screen in order to learn about the universe outside the Enterprise.

Using the same concept as the installation version of Radio Frankenstein, the online version displays fragments of text from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein flying across the screen as the novel is collaged and spoken by the computer.

Radio Wonderland

2000 p. 72

Online software tool for multi-user remixes of image, sound and animation.

LIMM is an Internet mixer which allows several authors to create interactive multimedia collages collaboratively in real time. The source materials for the collages are images, sounds and animations drawn from across the web, using a variety of formats: .jpeg, .gif, .bmp, .swf, .mpeg, .mov, .mp3 and .wav. Collaborators can share one another’s playlists and communicate via text messages through the software while performing.

tiny, funny, big and sad

This piece takes as its source material a computer database of all the text from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Custom software creates a collage of the book, recombining and re-assembling text fragments into everchanging patterns. The resulting collage is read aloud by a synthetic voice, broadcast over a large indoor area via a pirate radio transmitter. Visitors carry small, customised transistor radios to hear the work over one floor of the venue in which it was installed.

Website with software-generated audio and found text.

No longer live.

DVD, colour, sound, duration: 20 minutes.

90

Installation with electronic sculpture and microwatt radio broadcast of custom software-generated audio.

Radio Frankenstein [online version]

Edition of 10

LIMM (2000–2001)

p. 74

p. 75

Electronic sculpture, custom software and microwatt radio transmitter.

A computer database of text from the book Alice in Wonderland (1865) forms the source material of this work. Custom software selects samples from this database at random, creating an ever-changing textual collage. A computer-generated voice reads out the resulting word combinations. This audio, along with theme music and sound effects, is broadcast to a collection of radios installed in the gallery via a microwatt radio transmitter.

Airworld Series (1999–2000) Various projects

pp. 76–77

The Airworld series was initiated by a residency that the artists undertook, the ‘World Views’ residency programme, in the World Trade Center’s 91st floor in 1999. Airworld developed into a series of playful interventions with global capitalism, running between 1999 and 2000.

Airworld Probe From the Airworld series

An unseen protagonist moves through corporate space seen as an airless foreign terrain. Shot at the World Trade Center’s 91st floor during the ‘World Views’ residency programme.

p. 76

Web project with found online video. No longer maintained. www.airworld.net Airworld Security Desk is a real-time window into the world of work. The Security page cycles through a database of live Internet cameras focused on office spaces, desks, lobbies, highways and computer screens.

Since it shows live camera images, the work varies moment to moment.

1999

Airworld Banner Ads From the Airworld series

Website remix project incorporating found image and text. No longer maintained. www.airworld.net Airworld Economic Theories uses DHTML and javascript to create a real-time remix between texts taken from the economic theory of Marx and the content of prominent financial websites.

Airworld Flood Timer From the Airworld series

Videotape, colour, audio, duration 3:50 minutes.

Airworld Security Desk From the Airworld series

Airworld Economic Theories From the Airworld series

p. 76

Web-based intervention using banner ads incorporating photographs and text.

This online project used the Doubleclick.com advertising network to distribute 1 million banner ads over one month, from mid-August to mid-September 1999. Each banner ad adopted a business slogan such as ‘option: business as usual’ or ‘welcome, we are air.’ The ads were displayed on third-party websites. Doubleclick.com did not inform the sites on which the ads were displayed that they were hosting an artist project rather than standard advertising content.

p. 77

Software for web-based intervention. www.airworld.net/soft.html Airworld Flood Timer was produced in solidarity with art collective etoy.com as they attempted to flood the site of eToys.com in the 1999 performance/intervention ‘Toywar’. The Flood Timer was designed to test the response of the eToys web servers by repeatedly making random site search queries and timing the delivery of the results.

The user has no controls other than to start or stop it.

Airworld Jargon Machine From the Airworld series Generative web project with streaming video incorporating found image and text. No longer maintained. www.airworld.net Airworld Jargon Machine is a collage of image and text that uses dot-com language as its source material.

The artists used software to scan websites where the Airworld Banner Ads were displayed, collecting their texts and press releases. The Jargon Machine extracts from this database to create ever-changing text combinations.

Using these texts, the software searches for images using AltaVista image search, automatically assembling the results into a streaming video.

Airworld Radio From the Airworld series Computer-generated audio presented as webcast and FM radio broadcast.

Airworld Radio used computer text-to-speech software to read phrases and words sampled from the Jargon Machine database. This ever-changing collage of corporate marketing language was webcast at http:// www.airworld.net, and was also broadcast over FM radio on a temporary basis. It has also been shown as a public sound installation.

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