BOMB PARTS
16mm master negative, 2007
Running Time: 3 minutes
Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Hand Processing: Matthew Kelson

BAGHDAD PLAN IS A SUCCESS
16mm master negative, 2007
Running Time: 3 minutes
Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Hand Processing: Matthew Kelson

LOW PAY AND BROKEN PROMISES
16mm master negative, 2007
Running Time: 3 minutes
Producer/ Director: Sabine Gruffat
Hand Processing: Matthew Kelson
Long Statement


As an interdisciplinary media artist, I learn from the culture industry—its institutions, history, narrative formulae and other such devices—foremost for its ability to affect, but also as a means of challenging the codes and patterns it uses to attribute meaning and produce definition. I believe these attempts at definition (through naming, categorizing, and limiting) are suggestive not only of poor assumptions but also failures of vision. As a result, collective freedoms and singularities inherent in difference are at stake. Therefore, through my art I strive to work poetically between the bounds of existing languages in order to produce unique and compelling meanings.

My work thus aims to disrupt the repetitions of circumscribed, yet superficial classifications disseminated by cultural media production through institutionalized ideological systems of distribution, including: museums, film studios, mass media publications, advertisements and the like. Believing genres similarly share specific and inveterate codes that organize reality into implicit and typified experiences, I seek to maneuver through, redirect and otherwise manipulate their conventions as a means of engendering disruptions among the aforementioned systems. By working within and around the language of the Western film or Science Fiction novel, the museum audio tour or the news photograph, I seek to draw connections between these infinitely recurring spectacles of reality and the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) contradictions beneath their ever-present and seemingly obvious messages. To achieve this, my work takes as fact the cybernetic, standardized and surface nature of many identities and forms, including my own, and digitally collages the contrasting and incoherent values that reflect off their glossy, clichéd appearances. These acts of questioning, disordering and revising exist, then, as both a means for me to critique culture and to make art.

Headlines:Hybrid Films is a project investigating hybrid technologies of communication and translation while exploring information, news, and mass media. These films were made from The New York Times newspaper articles. The semi - automated animation process resulted in sentence recombinations that sometimes made sense while randomly emphasizing certain words and images.

Each computer animation was transferred to one 100ft roll of 16mm Tri-X reversal film and then hand-processed. The reversal negative is the original.