PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN ANIMATED GIF (1996)
The year is 1996. Who is this cyborg-narrator that twitches
in gif animation? Is it nothing more than herky-jerky
video created especially for the 28.8 external modem
attached to the idealized, distributed Other? Like Marcel
Duchamp, Man Ray and Bruce Nauman before him, Amerika
uses the self-portrait model to investigate what Beckett
called "the poisonous ingenuity of Time in the
science of affliction," while simultaneously experimenting
with the playfulness of this new medium he is quickly attaching
himself too. Compressing all of his thoughts into one
ever-changing meme destined for 24/7 distribution in
the neural network, Amerika the artist and Amerika the
alternative cultural icon both become a flickering meta-tag
of unspecified origin. |
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