Stimulus – Video

Posted: January 29, 2013 at 9:43 pm




Stimulus
Made up of appropriated pharmaceutical television commercials, "Stimulus" plays off of the double meaning of economic and bodily/chemical stimuli. Using a series of precisely edited snippets, the piece quickly builds to a stuttering, hysterical/historical tangle of language, image, and the molecular body. Amongst other things, it is about looking and consuming, gender politics, biopower, and capital. The length of the piece is a restrained one minute, a tightly crafted piece to match a traditional 60 second advertising spot. "Stimulus" follows a repetition/break structure, a classical advertising (and noted storytelling/folktale) technique in which expectations are created/repeated and then thwarted in the final moment. It uses abrasive, repetitive editing along with humor and breaks to seduce the viewer into its rhythm. Two images are arranged one on top of the other, and the screen is oriented vertically, unlike traditional film and video (and more along the lines of increasing tendencies for video to be shot vertically on smartphones). In the installation, the screens are then multiplied, in itself a repetition of the image and suggestive of the repetitive nature of consumption and excretion, as well as defining a human, figurative space. The original clips are thus twice rotated in order to be read by the viewer, a kind of double-gymnastics. My video practice draws inspiration in particular from the work of Sturtevant and Gretchen Bender, amongst others who use ...

By: Jeff Ostergren

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Stimulus - Video

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