Smaller sample movie
Quicktime Movie, 4 min, 22MB (rough compression)

Larger sample movie
Quicktime Movie, 6 min, 87MB (nicer compression)

A real-time algorithmic work, created with the author’s generative performance system. Actual performances can be of any length, and be made with various source batches.

American Engineer was created by a system for video and audio performance. In both the visual and audio domains, a flood of samples are selected, processed, and mixed in real time. These processes are randomly automated by a hierarchy of parameters. Because of this, I can, at any moment, determine my level of control. As a result, the system functions between a performance and an installation and between authored, automated, and driven by chance. Most intereesting to me, however, is when the system is run on its own, creating beauty with human interaction.

The visuals dash between the concrete and the completely abstracted. The overwhelming amount of visual data is, I feel, best suited to informal presentation settings in which the viewer can also choose his or her own level of engagement. The accompanying audio, though also created from samples, is more lulling than the visuals. The overall result functions more as an environment or backdrop, rather than as a focal point.

Though first conceived as a purely aesthetic endeavor, the inherently loaded nature of the imagery demands a conceptual involvement as well. This incarnation uses footage primarily from science and education films (though an anti-pornography film often cuts in with the most obviously charged pictures) from the Prelinger Archive. Between the corporate-sponsored views of a bright future through technology, to wary looks at atomic power, mass media, and social mores, the footage juxtaposes wildly different attitudes towards technology’s ability to improve human life. In such a fragmented presentation, however, the contexts of most individual images are lost, carrying the burden of interpretation to the viewer. The viewer, however, has little opportunity to process any single instance within the torrent of sensory input.