Facebook app as artistic medium:
Begin forwarded message:
From: James Coupe <[email protected]>
Date: March 23, 2010 10:07:13 AM PDT
To: Undisclosed-recipients: <>;
Subject: TODAY, TOO, I EXPERIENCED SOMETHING I HOPE TO UNDERSTAND IN
A FEW DAYS
If you have trouble reading this email, please go to the online
version.
Folly, FACT and Cornerhouse present
JAMES COUPE
TODAY, TOO, I EXPERIENCED SOMETHING I HOPE TO UNDERSTAND IN A FEW DAYS
Launched March 15th, 2010
Running as a permanent Facebook Application
http://apps.facebook.com/i-hope-to-understand
And as a YouTube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/ihopetounderstand
JAMES COUPE: TODAY, TOO, I EXPERIENCED SOMETHING I HOPE TO
UNDERSTAND IN A FEW DAYS
Every day, this work automatically generates a video and uploads it
to YouTube and Facebook. The video's narrative is algorithmically
constructed from Facebook status updates published by people from
Barrow, England. Demographic information extracted from these
updates is matched with a database of video portraits and clips from
contextually relevant YouTube videos. The status updates that the
project selects are typically from a number of different users, as
the system seeks out the best combination of available posts until
it finds something that can be considered a story.
The result is a collective narrative that dynamically evolves in
tandem with the events, obsessions and dialogs that shape our lives.
It approaches social networks as generative spaces in which
personal, introspective reflections and public announcements combine
with a broad fascination with the lives of others to build meaning
from shared real-time, non-linear, simultaneous data.
Commissioned for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, this is the
first in a series of site-specific Facebook artworks by Coupe,
exploring the relationship between voyeurism and exhibitionism
inside social networks. Facebook status updates can be considered as
a form of networked storytelling, through which we communicate what
we do, and how we want to be seen. They are also a new form of
voluntary self-surveillance, evoking Foucauldian concerns with the
self-regulating effect of conscious and permanent visibility.
To receive updates from the project, including new videos as they
are generated, subscribe to the YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/ihopetounderstand
James Coupe
... turning traditional methods of filmmaking upside down, Coupe
takes an algorithmic approach to cinema and, in doing so, transforms
reality into narrative.
James Coupe is a British artist based in Seattle. He works primarily
with installation, video and the internet. His controversial recent
work with "surveillance cinema", in projects such as (re)collector
and Surveillance Suite, uses computer vision software to extract
demographic and behavioral information from video footage. The
footage is then automatically reorganized and recontextualized into
narratives, often based upon classic film scripts.
Notable exhibitions include New Contemporaries at Camden Arts
Centre, Low-Fi at Stills Gallery Edinburgh and the Enter_ Festival
in Cambridge. In 2009 he received a Creative Capital award to
develop Surveillance Suite as a museum-based interactive
installation, and completed a Folly/Lanternhouse International
residency.
www.jamescoupe.com
-*-*--**---***-----*****--------********
Harvard & Roy Arts Council
list options:
http://grauwald.com/mailman/listinfo/hrac_grauwald.com
-*-*--**---***-----*****--------********
-*-*--**---***-----*****
-*-*--**---***
-*-*--**
-*-*
-*
