Q: what is the name of this piece?
A: The Afterlife
Q: what is this piece about?
A: It shapes a terrain for the senses and can come off as a somewhat overly determined, indeterminate state. On another level, "Afterlife" concerns collective memory, most notably by spreading a very familiar 1986 Hollywood film evenly over 21 TVs so that we see the entire movie once every 5+ minutes, or 21 times every 109 minutes.
I want this work to have a generous relationship to its audience, one that invites us to draw our own conclusions. At the same time, it should include the part of us that needs to draw conclusions. My intention is to encourage our potential to find the analytical process meaningful in and of itself. I chose "Top Gun" because it is a wildly popular film, which most of us immediately recognize.
It is in our collective consciousness and, hence, it is fertile territory for our collective subjectivity. I do not completely understand why this movie has become so widely familiar. For me, watching it is a guilty pleasure. I identify and have a love-hate relationship with Tom Cruise as "Maverick". "Top Gun" is mostly U.S. Navy bravado, but I'm more interested in how it packages and presents certain age-old themes in ways that can both deeply affect and entertain us.
Q: how is your work "technology-based"?
A: These TVs and VCRs are displayed as representatives of not only technology but some of our favorite technology. Each of them has had a domestic life sitting in our living rooms while playing movies in a sort of collaboration with our household atmosphere.
I think of them as old married couples. For this reason, I chose not to rent or purchase the sets, but instead borrowed them from the homes of my friends and family and the New Fangle crew, curators and board. Ultimately, the collective history of these electronics as assembled here reverberates to invoke their unique pathos.
