Seth Price
2021"Painting" Sites
Seth Price
The first in a series of videos investigating the use of digital effects on appropriated imagery, "Painting" Sites compiles pictures arbitrarily yielded by an Internet search for the word "Painting," and peppers the resulting series of images with digital graffiti, courtesy of editing software. When Price began the piece, in 2000, automated image-search tools did not yet exist online; instead, the artist used text-based searches, taking arbitrary screenshots of each and every page that was returned and then cropping out all but the image, an approach that occasionally yielded visual hallmarks like improperly loaded data or the appearance of the cursor.
"Painting" Sites
Industrial Synth
Seth Price
A dense montage of graphics, charts, and animations, Industrial Synth takes up the tradition of the experimental essay film and flattens it into an oblique composition that reflects on the technological and consumerist dimensions of Modernity. Negating cinematic elements of narrative, performance, and conventional signification, Price's video nonetheless conveys a sense of the pathos of a contemporary digital society, which, despite its promise of the new, relentlessly circles around issues of obsolescence and death.
Industrial Synth
Social Synth
Seth Price
A robot camera spent six hours moving across the skin of a squid, taking over ten thousand photographs, which Price then processed through satellite map-making technology and 3D graphics software to yield this projection. In this hybrid work natural and artificial are intertwined, and a computer-generated reflection becomes the protagonist in a strange landscape.
Social Synth
Nieuw Jacxz Swinjge
Seth Price
Excerpted from Price's 2001 video-lecture "New York Woman," which explored the ways in which music production techniques change over time, NJS Map uses animated diagrams to lay out the historical development of one period in pop music, the briefly-lived but influential genre often called "New Jack Swing." While the video now stands alone, it must be seen as an intentional fragment, a piece of supplemental material activated by other elements of Price's "redistribution" work. For example, a 2003 essay, part of his ongoing project "Title Variable" (2001-), also investigates the New Jack Swing genre, and is itself linked to a musical album (both are available on-line; see below). Written in the style of popular music journalism, Price's essay states that "the entire New Jack Swing venture can be seen as a producer's grab for market share, a way to assimilate an obstreperous but commercially successful youngster into the secure, decades-old structures of popular black music."
Nieuw Jacxz Swinjge
Digital Video Effect: "Editions"
Seth Price
This video was created and released into distribution as one work in a solo exhibition that Price held simultaneously at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York in September 2006. As a video in the EAI collection, it is the one piece in the exhibition that remains "on-view" indefinitely, after the rest of the show has closed. The video serves as a sampler of Price's editioned videos to date, all of which have been sold through the Petzel and Spaulings galleries in small numbers. Here, fragments of sound and image from the editions have been brought together, yielding a montage that, while bordering on incoherence, provides access to these publicly unavailable artworks. Price juxtaposes disparate authors, editing strategies, and histories, yielding a work in the essay-film tradition, at once lyrical and messy, highly-edited and arbitrarily composed.
Digital Video Effect: "Editions"
Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance
Seth Price
Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance purports to be a collection of unused video and audio clips left over from the artist's other works, from an abandoned audio piece on religious themes to an exploration of web video as it emerged in a time before YouTube and video search engines. Interlacing voice-over and sound with the sorts of graphic imagery that could belong equally to advertisements, corporate reels, amateur home pages, and video games, Price takes on religious and scientific discourse, the history of experimental cinema, the interrelation of culture and technology, and the social naturalization of violence. At the same time, however, this index of material at once discarded and made useful, with its claim to a formal structure based on "importance," provokes the question of how much its themes and messages are actually intended to cohere and communicate.
Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance
Folk Music & Documentary
Seth Price
A corollary to Price's written piece "Sports," Folk Music and Documentary takes on questions of political speech and political image in a time when terms like "globalization" or even "politics" itself are so emptied out as to be meaningless in everyday usage. The 1990s were years of newfound engagement and activism among the young, if we are to believe the international press and its invocation of a new class of anarchist, "anti-globalization" youth. Price gives voice and image to this cliché in what is at once a screen-test, an audition, and a proposition with no clear intent or message.
Folk Music & Documentary