clearchannel

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CLEARCHANNEL

DAVID GATTEN AND JESSIE STEAD
September 28 – November 10, 2007

CLEARCHANNEL is a see-thru, semi-interactive, semi-site specific, multi-media installation. Its inter-exchangeable contents sometimes attempt to distill the view from both sides of the (plastic) lens between the non-human, elemental dimension and the industrialized human gaze (whatever that is). This lens is not generally regarded as being two-way…CLEARCHANNEL imagines the environ-mental “other side” as having point of view and agency for documentable language (at least when confronted with writable or re-writable media).

Recording the frontiers of the recordable world, CLEARCHANNEL re-frames evidence that analogue consciousness goes beyond the human boundary …but cannot measure how far (and attempts to construct a translation channel but cannot measure how authentic). In other words, if the Atlantic Ocean itself could address us, media-tongued, by holding a public screening of its new film, would you attend? David Gatten will project WHAT THE WATER SAID, a six-part, ten-year-in-the-makingcinematic experiment in 16mm film, salt water, and good old-fashioned metaphysical mystique. The entirety of the motion picture’s image and sound are created by the direct actions of this popular ocean onto the celluloid filmstrips.

Jessie Stead’s archive of abandoned CDs and DVDs found in cemeteries and urban sidewalks from coast to coast will reveal visible levels of articulation in random decay. As commonly discarded media items, these digital-era bodies continue to record a vagrant reality after being left behind in the elements.

Antithetically or perhaps not, the so-called natural world is simultaneously generalized into reproducible graphics in consumer culture. CLEARCHANNEL has undertaken a survey of the allegorical, mountain-and-waterfall themed landscapes found commonly on bottled water packaging as an attempt to locate the other end of these elementally authored artifacts. The plastic-contained world of pop consumables is unapologetically illustrated with generalized perceptions of the sublime natural world. These (and more) are re-re-presented in mobile stereoscopes, projectionables, as well as in the inter-active CLEARCHANNEL analogue video library.

During a recent press conference for CLEARCHANNELit was brought to Stead and Gatten’s attention that a giant, controversial USA-based media corporation also uses the name “Clear Channel”. Stead and Gatten replied, “We’ve never heard of it.”

Press Release

View more work by David Gatten
View more work by Jessie Stead

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