| Rebecca Gordon: I am watching your video Electricity in the Air (American Beauty) as we speak. I see a digitalized recreation of the definitive scene in the 1999 film American Beauty, in which a plastic bag dances in a winter wind against a brick wall. In your video, the bag and the wall fill the frame, accompanied by a midi version of the eerie American Beauty melody, the scene now recreated in the mode of an outdated video game. What is your interest in this scene, and your impetus to recreate it in this way? Your past work has often integrated and referenced popular cultural imagery and iconic characters, but this degree of recreating the entirety of a filmic moment seems to be a new direction. | 
|
Rebecca Gordon in an artist, writer, and curator currently completing both an MA and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Michael Bell-Smith is an artist who lives in Philadelphia. His work will be on view at Foxy Productions from January 10 to February 16.
Rebecca Gordon: I am watching your video Electricity in the Air (American Beauty) as we speak. I see a digitalized recreation of the definitive scene in the 1999 film American Beauty, in which a plastic bag dances in a winter wind against a brick wall. In your video, the bag and the wall fill the frame, accompanied by a midi version of the eerie American Beauty melody, the scene now recreated in the mode of an outdated video game. What is your interest in this scene, and your impetus to recreate it in this way? Your past work has often integrated and referenced popular cultural imagery and iconic characters, but this degree of recreating the entirety of a filmic moment seems to be a new direction.
Michael Bell-Smith: Well I think a lot about the difficulties surrounding personal, emotional experiences in a culture where so much of our life is mediated. I found the scene in the film appealing because for me it really engaged that tension. In one respect we have this image that—in my opinion—is genuinely moving. In another respect, however, it’s total Hollywood schlock, the footage simply acting as a device to show how arty and deep this alienated teenager is. I thought that by flattening the scene, creating this looping lo-fi tableau, it could bring that tension to the forefront. By simplifying things, the mediation is highlighted, and maybe the beauty as well.
RG: So for you, the digitalization or videogame-ization of images is a way of pointing the viewer toward a realization of the impossibility of a “unique” or “original” experience of a pop-cultural moment? How does this conversation play out on the level of your interest in the pixel—the purposeful and painstaking making visible of the pixel in your work?
MBS: While a lot of the animation I make looks like old video games, that aesthetic, for me, isn’t about nostalgia or gaming per se. In this case, it’s about a reduction of form into the basics—a moving white blob, a static brick background. One reason I’m drawn to 2D animation is that it lends itself to essentialism, to systematizing things. Once you start making pictures move, you start making judgment calls—this thing is the background, this thing is the foreground, this thing loops, etc. That distillation is a way of figuring things out, getting to the core of them. The chunky pixels are my way of highlighting the digitization, highlighting the mediation. That scene in the film—it pretends to be natural, a real moment, but in actuality there are all these layers between us and that bag. I wanted to foreground that artifice by making it explicitly fake, explicitly mediated.
RG: I wonder about your interest in creative practices that take shape within our thoroughly mediated culture, both in your involvement with the internet surfing club Nasty Nets and in regards to your involvement in the larger conversation about copyright and creative uses of sampling or resignifying found material. Do you think we are at cultural turning point regarding the definition of a creative act?
MBS: I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re at a turning point. I think there are certain approaches to making things that are more prevalent in upload/download culture: practices centered around appropriation and selection as a creative process. But a lot of that has been going on in art for a while. If there is a larger shift, I think it’s that these approaches are being taken up by non-artists, people for whom messing around with things and sharing the result is just what they do, how they approach their environment. The thousands of fan edits and video remixes on Youtube are a good example. It creates an interesting and tricky space for artists working with similar approaches.
RG: I see you as part of a group of artists (including Cory Arcangel, Paper Rad, and John Michael Boling) who are interested in pushing the limits of what found digital information, modes, and practices are capable of in different contexts. While you have a deep appreciation for the types of creative remixing projects made by non-artists, much of your work is also distinct from them because you present it in a fine art context.
MBS: A lot of my work is inspired by “non-artist” projects. That’s not to say, however, that I’m not interested in fine art and the discourse around it, or that I don’t believe in the structures of the art world. You can think of it in terms of forms of distribution and the audience that comes with them. Youtube is great, but if you want something to be discussed critically, or read in relationship to movements in art, then you might be better off trying to work within the art world. I’m grateful that I have access to different outlets—galleries, the internet, the video distributor EAI—for works with different concerns that might engage different audiences.
RG: A work like Glitter Grade seems to me to quite relevant to art history in the way that it addresses and plays with incarnations of the transcendently beautiful landscape. Here we have an image of the sea at night glistening with the reflection of a million stars, yet it could also be inverted so that the stars are not a reflection but rather the sky itself, the ocean a perfect Photoshop gradient, under or over the sparkling animated stars. This piece challenges all of what I expect from gazing at a representation of a sublime landscape.
MBS: You refer to it as a sea—many people read it as a cityscape. I see it as another sort of distillation, a series of shortcuts used to represent a landscape as a simple generic structure: a line dividing sky from ground, rows of sparkles in diminishing height to suggest perspective, bands of color standing in for the complexity of light filtering through the atmosphere. I think there’s way in which the kind of primitive digital aesthetics I’m referencing suggest a romance around ideas of infinity, progression, and the future. I think that romance can engage a sort of sublime in lieu of the immensity of nature that we historically associate with landscapes.
RG: Speaking of glitter, anything fun happen at the Great Internet Sleepover at Eyebeam in August? Did you play slugs in your sleeping bags?
MBS: Over the past year or so, a community sprouted up online around a shared appreciation for new approaches to media art and the weirder aspects of the web. It’s mainly centered around a few group blogs (Nasty Nets, Supercentral, Double Happiness) and people sharing links via the website del.icio.us. The Sleepover was an opportunity for these people to get together in real life and talk about this web surfing–centered practice and what it might mean as a scene in a larger art or internet or cultural context. There were a lot of amazing people there and some super good discussions. But mostly it was about dancing and four-square and pizza and hair-braiding and prank phone calls.
RG: Were there zit stickers?
MBS: Virtual zit stickers.
