Digital Video Effect: "Holes", 2003
DVD, combination TV/DVD player in its own packaging.

From the transcript of the video Redistribution:

"Anyway, at that point I wanted to somehow get back into video, and I was thinking, how do people make video today? Materially, technologically, video as a tool, as a kind of structure. It seemed like people take “content” and feed it through a set of digital effects. This is true whether it’s a cheap TV documentary zooming slowly in on an archival photograph, or a Hollywood movie where footage is treated with color effects, or computer-generated imagery, or video art. So I decided to focus on the effects themselves. I made several videos that function like demonstrations of digital video transitions. They’re proposals for effects that could actually exist, like “plug-in” software you might buy and enlist in some project or other.

This one is called Digital Video Effect: “Holes.” The image accumulates as a series of droplets or holes, like paper-punch waste, and at a certain point you can see the image as a composite, though not entirely clearly, and then it drains away. The “content” here consists of pictures taken from websites that function as clearinghouses of grisly or brutal images, mostly pictures of people who have been in accidents, supposedly supplied by police examiners, morgue workers, or photojournalists who couldn’t publish the material. A lot of these could be fabrications, but the point is really about circulation and redundancy. You know, these kinds of images have been around forever, but now they have a new form of circulation, so it’s all different. Certainly the audience changes; when I was working on the video I showed it to some students, and they immediately identified the sites, and some recognized individual pictures. Last year it came out that American troops in Iraq were being awarded free porn-site memberships in exchange for uploading grisly war photographs to these other sites, which are often owned by the same companies."

Installed at Kunsthalle Zurich, 2008.

Installed, private home--open and closed.

Miscellaneous stills: