HN543

Walking into Hunter North 543, any Media 150 student may wonder how much media can they fit into one black box room? The answer, of course, is “a lot.” A huge filming screen, an audio room, Mac computers with interactive games, a big screen TV, and projections onto cloth canvases lined the walls of the Hunter’s Media Department’s Graduate Showcase. After an hour or so of perusing, a few pieces stuck out. The clever iAM by Megan Speary is a visual play on words, and commercialism. The repeating lists of “i + VERB,” conclude with the double-entendre “iAM a buy-product.” Just as thought provoking is the clever “Bare Market” coloring book collection, which allows visitors to color in the depictions of bailouts and white collar con-artists. Another interactive installment included a digital “slot machine” of commercial image. The visual bombardment exemplifies the tendency of the human mind to correlate unrelated images. Further down the line, a rather tasteless (in my opinion), computer program attacked the American disease of obesity. Unclear statistics coupled with a slide show of exploitive, and seemingly unoriginal, images taunted the issue, instead of comprehensively suggesting ways to improve the epidemic. While I found the majority of the pieces inspiring, one video-short captured my attention because of its ability to parallel visual and audio elements with the emotive aspects of the narrative.


“Wives of Spies (or where they found it),” by A.E. Souzis “explore(s) the physical and psychic collisions between global politics, surveillance, secrecy and public and private lives.” In the course of four and half minutes, the viewer experiences the lives of three women, as they narrate, in their native languages’ where they discovered that their husbands were double-agents. The piece begins with audio “bleeps” and a small blinking google map. The first wife names the a location of her discovery—“Arriba (upstairs).” More bleeping, blinking, zooming in and naming of domestic locations culminate into a chaotic aesthetic overload of nine google maps, radio transmissions, and three different languages. These artistic choices mirror the mounting drama of unraveling a secret. A “blinking” glimpse of data will confirm a “bleeping” suspicion until thousands of pieces of evidence berate the investigator/viewer’s mind. The installment ends with one of the wives cooly declaring, “locked in a box.” Just like a secret kept hidden from your spouse, the video medium is locked in a box—a television screen in Hunter North 543. I found it astounding that the artist’s concrete and technical choices mirrored the human experience behind the piece’s narrative.