Making It New - Make it new (January)
Light Bytes is two sequences of short digital animation works by two artists; Making It New by Lesley Kaiser and Millennium Girl by Kezia Barnett.
Light Bytes is a multi-sited work that is currently screening in-between the ads on a four-storey high projection billboard (on the wall, Freyberg place, off High Street, after dark every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, every week, 2003 with works changing monthly). Light Bytes is a year long project.
Light Bytes projects. Light Bytes is sloganistic and mimics, subverts and inhabits advertising language, methods and techniques. Light Bytes is eye-catching. Light Bytes loves colour.
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Lesley Kaiser
Making It New - Make it new (January) |
Kezia Barnett's work is based on her 'Daily Photo' project and Lesley Kaiser's is based on her text works. The two sets of animations bounce off and inform each other. Being in a public space they allow for art to intersect with spaces usually reserved for advertising, and thus reach a wider audience, and nudge expectations.
Both artists' works on the animated billboard interact and play with colour fields; today's painting.
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Kezia Barnett
Millennium Girl |
Light Bytes / Millennium Girl, by Kezia Barnett: Animation by Kezia Barnett
Computer animations made using scans of 'daily photographs' that have been cut-out, digitally manipulated, touched up and moved around. Millennium Girl inhabits stardom and publicity; she is a public pinup.
History:
The 'daily photo' project started in 1997, and is now nearly six years old; I take a photograph every day, of where I am, what I do and who I'm with. In 1997 I exhibited nine months of these photos at the George Fraser gallery, in an exhibition called Calendar Girl, as part of a two-person show 'Barnett Newman'.
Animations: Light Bytes' quirky animations use one image selected from each calendar month out of this collection of photographs. Accompanying these 'dancing' photographs are lyrics (presented visually with a sing-a-long bouncy ball) that help to inhabit, shift and destabilize the images. Millennium Girl inhabits stardom, inhabits publicity; is a public pinup. It's a quirky commodity, a disguise.
Ideas:
Stardom: Inhabiting stardom; 'Every Woman and every Man is a Star' (Aleister Crowley). The 'star' loses their unique 'aura' through being filmed by a mechanical contrivance. To compensate there is an artificial build-up of the star persona outside the studio; the 'star' as a commodity.
Light Bytes is based on photographs that have had their present 'aura', that of the 'real' subject, removed (by the fact of them being taken by a camera). My personality now has to be re-'created'. Millennium Girl, by showing these manipulated photographs on a public site, provides publicity without there being a 'real' star to publicise.
The pinup: The idea of the public 'pinup' - intended to mass produced the 'pinup' is highly stylised and is informed by the conventions of fine art. Fine art and the 'pinup' are both forms of display. 'To be put on display is to have the surface of one's own skin turned into a disguise' (Berger). In this project I inhabit the pinup, inhabit publicity, inhabit 'stardom'.
Private/ Public: Turning the private into public; the private star becomes a public pinup. By using everyday images of myself, from my life, and re-presenting these in public, I turn them into an advertisement of sorts; but the product doesn't exist.
Light Bytes / Making It New, by Lesley Kaiser: Animation by Kezia Barnett
Computer animations of a selection of short texts take the viewer through a visual journey wherein the texts turn into images. Text begins to move and meanings begin to shift.
The majority of these works are based on previous text works I have exhibited earlier in different formats with John Barnett. Some of the texts e.g. make it new, date back to 1766 BC (when the founder of the Tzang Empire in China carved these words on his bath), bringing 'memes'*, or 'cultural genes', from the past into the present - preserving, renewing, inventing, while virally inhabiting contemporary signage systems. Other animations are based on original thought-provoking texts that are sloganistic and often reflect upon the politics of the times.
*A meme is the word used for the entity that might play the role of gene in the transmission of words, ideas, faiths, mannerisms and fashions. Since 1976, when the word was coined, increasing numbers of people have adopted the name 'meme' for the postulated gene analogue. There is at least a superficial analogy to the longitudinal transmission of genes down generations, and to the horizontal transmission of genes in viruses.' [Richard Dawkins in the forward to The Meme Machine (1999) by Susan Blackmore].
Cognitive scientists suggest that imitation (which is how memes are transmitted) could have been the key to what set our ancestors apart from all other animals and which lead to the rapid increase in size of the human brain, and the success of humans as a species. Language and writing, unique to the human species, are what enable us to pass down memes across time and place, along with another human characteristic - reciprocal altruism (humans are uniquely cooperative and spend a great deal of their time doing things that benefit others as well as themselves, in what psychologists sometimes refer to as 'pro-social behaviour').
Examples of the texts / memes that form the basis of these Light Bytes animations are:
Make it new (January)
Losing improves your character; winning improves your
wardrobe (February)
A little ignorance goes a long way (March)
A Grey Area (April)
Increase the Peace (May)
Never tell THE TROUBLE what the trouble is (June)
Every
wall has two reasons for existing (July)
Nothing is more certain than death
nor less certain than it's hour (August)
Blind Acts of Faith: Blind Axe of Fate (August)
We think we see opposites instead of transitions (September)
Visual Sound Bytes: Light Bytes
ARTISTS' BIOGRAPHIES:
Kezia Barnett:
SHORT BIOGRAPHY: Kezia Barnett is an artist / film-maker. Her cyber-bubblegum aesthetic and her quirky interest in contemporary theory, musicals, costume, inhabiting stardom and colour, infuse her work. Film. Video. Photography. Animation. Installation. Her works have been shown both nationally and internationally.
BIOGRAPHY: Kezia Barnett is an artist / filmmaker. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1998 (BFA, majoring in Intermedia Studies - time based media). Her work utilises various media, including film, video, photography, musicals, costume, animation, and installation.
She has produced, written, directed and designed several short films, animations and documentaries; including Girls on Film (1995), "small town" Tinsel Town (1996), Bubblegum Valley (1997/8), Cyber Kicks (1999), Paperdoll Girl (2000) and Sweet As Candy (2003). These have been shown in both local and international festivals (including Videobrasil [Brazil], VideoMedeja [Yugoslavia], Cine Clube de Avanca [Portugal], WOW festival [Sydney], Experimenta Media Arts Festival [Melbourne] and the 35th International Film Festival [NZ]).
Art exhibitions include: Barnett Newman - Calendar Girl (1997), at the George Fraser Gallery and Light Bytes (current projected animations on a four story high billboard in High Street, Auckland). Group art exhibitions include: Soliton (Regent Theatre, 2003), The Minutes - a Relay Event (Artspace, 1997), Soliton (1997), Art on Air (95 BFM, 1996 and 1997), MONITOR (the Physics Room, Christchurch, 1996), Oestrogen Rising (Artspace, 1996), and The Atomic Age Opens Postcard Project (a mail art exhibition at the Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio).
Whilst studying at Auckland University she was awarded several scholarships including the Senior Scholarship in Film and Television and Media Studies, the Elam Art Scholarship and the NZ Federation of University Women's Final Year First Degree Scholarship. She gained straight A grades.
She has worked freelance within the film and television industry in various capacities. In 1998 she was live-in field director / camera operator for More Flatmates (a reality TV programme), and more recently she has directed a music video for the Whiz Kidz, Boyracer, that was a finalist in the New Zealand music video awards, 2003. She has also been an art director, editor, and researcher.
Kezia's work has a 1950s cyber-bubblegum-pop aesthetic: quirky, stylised and colour-coded. Referencing notions that 'film' and 'stardom' are constructs, she creates fictitious hyper-real, super-colour-saturated worlds in which her 'cut-out' characters come to life. Her quirky interest in contemporary theory, inhabiting stardom, dressing up and colour, infuse her work.
Lesley Kaiser:
SHORT BIOGRAPHY: Lesley Kaiser is an artist/author who works at Auckland University of Technology as a lecturer in Art and Design. Her work inhabits a wide range of public sites - TV, newspapers, electronic signs, video, super market rollouts, stickers - as well as being shown in art galleries.
BIOGRAPHY: Lesley Kaiser is an artist/author. She completed her BA (in English and Philosophy) at Victoria University of Wellington before gaining her Diploma of Teaching at Secondary Teachers College, Auckland. She then went on to further study at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.
Over a period of more than twenty years she has worked in a wide range of media, from the more traditional areas of sculpture and painting, through the design-related fields of illustration, photography, and pop-up books for the international market, running her own freelance design business in the 1980s. Her current work as an artist has involved exhibiting in a number of sites, e.g. TV, newspapers, electronic signs of various types (see Landfall 182), video, art galleries, multi-media events, and her textworks have appeared on super market rollouts, self-adhesive stickers distributed with magazines and in pageworks.
They are currently showing as animations in among the ads in Light Bytes at Night, on a four-storey high wall, Freyberg Place, Auckland (every Wednesday to Saturday night throughout 2003). Group exhibitions include Art Now - the first biennial review of contemporary art at the Museum of New Zealand (1994). Publications include The Naughty Nineties pop-up book (which became an international best seller, first edition 1982), Like Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream (1993), The River Sticks and Post Art (both 1994), Where We Are Now (1995), and a number of one-off, or small edition, artists books. Much of her work has been in collaboration with John Barnett - their most recently published projects have been a study of joking culture in NZ - The Penguin Book of NZ Jokes (1996), Shark infested custard. A kiwi kids joke book (1997) and The Penguin Book of More New Zealand Jokes (1998).
lightbytes@hotmail.com
SPONSORS: RMG, AUT, Double J