Artist Statement - Tra Bouscaren
I engage American spectacle at the crossroads of waste culture and the surveillance state.
My site-responsive process begins with pulling local materials from the waste stream that bear symbolic, indexical, and poetic resonance with the toxic underbelly of American culture.
Assembling the trash into networks of provisional sculpture, I weave a sequence of security cameras into the sculptural aggregate. The cameras are positioned to capture live video of viewer-participants as they consider the sculpture into which the cameras are embedded. That surveillance video is algorithmically distorted and mashed-up with live streaming internet news feeds*. The sum total of the aggregated video then becomes the basis for a multi-channel video bath into which the entire space of exhibition is submerged.
The sculpted trash that forms the material basis of the installation is literally illuminated through the surveillance of those who see it. Projecting live surveillance mashups of viewer-participants back onto the material of the exhibition collapses the viewer into the (toxic) viewed, implicating viewer-participants back into what they have arrived to judge,.
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* The specific parameters of these mash-ups are effectively infinite in variation, and can further be programmed towards increasing interactivity as the specific project demands. Through infra-red motion tracking, EEG projection-matrix control, proximity and/or micro-controller based interactions, sonic modulations, machined DMX interactions, gaming camera body point capture, and other possibilities, viewer-participants
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“Pollution is in fashion today, exactly in the same way as revolution: it dominates the whole life of society, and it is represented in illusory form in the spectacle.”
--Guy Debord, "A Sick Planet”
