Erik Conrad // Sky Frostenson // Adrian Herbez // Garnet Hertz // Ryan Schoelerman // Margaret Watson // So Yamaoka

Sky Frostenson

De-generative Politricks:
Chop-up Chomsky vs. Bricolage Bush

This project presents an automated microediting technique which indefinitely regenerates video speech — resulting in an overall aesthetic somewhat à la Max Headroom. Speech is generated via a content-agnostic algorithm which pulls individual video word segments from an organized database, according to predefined sentence structures loosely modeled after generative grammar derivation trees. In so doing, the traditional subjects are transformed into quasi-sensical talking head video characters, often quite removed from their original rhetorical orientation, yet using the exact same words. At times the project becomes an experiment in speech perception, where the overlapping phonemes typically produced by the coarticulation of normal speech are broken and employed in new contexts. In this sense, viewers tend to infer meaning from otherwise arbitrary and unorthodox syntactic and phonological combinations.

This instantiation of the project uses the system to explore undercurrents of the American political dialectic, engendered and perpetuated via the network society and its media systems. The audiovisual mix is set up in a two-character debate structure, with the intellectual left represented with content from Noam Chomsky’s “Distorted Morality,” and the populist right represented with exerpts from George W. Bush’s speech to the 2004 Republican National Convention. Both characters in this rendition represent not only their respective political orientations, but also their notable facilities with the rhetorical powers of the English language.

BLOWHARD:
Respiring the Rhetoric of Fear Culture

BLOWHARD is an interactive investigation into the rhetoric of fear culture, exploiting this carefully crafted atmosphere of anxiety by redeploying it in a breathtakingly new two-player game. Players compete by breathing into a specially crafted CPR mask, where a breath sensor translates cumulative respiration into the player's current level of anxiety, shown on the screen in the same friendly color-coded system used by the Department of Homeland Security's Threat Advisory System.

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About the artist

Sky Frostenson is a multi/interdisciplinary media designer, artist, and aesthetic programmer, originally from Los Alamos, New Mexico. Currently completing his MFA degree in the Arts Computation Engineering program at the University of California, Irvine, he is also a researcher and teacher affiliated with the UCI Studio Art Department, the UC Game Culture & Technology Lab, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal(IT)2), and the UC Digital Arts Research Network. He holds a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts, both from the University of California, San Diego.

His main artistic project development focus includes (but is certainly not limited to) iconoclastic iconographies, floating signifiers, eschatological mythologies, and their tactical implementation in a wide variety of neworked cultural software and new media agitprop endeavors, with a special emphasis on gaming and interaction design. He periodically posts projects, links, and other digital detritus at his personal network site, illinest.net. Recently he co-founded the collaborative venture QUASI-CAUSE Heavy Media Industries.

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