Search Engine Vision "Chair", Single Channel Video, 2011

5min 50sec, 1920 x 1080 HD

 

Users of online communities create visual languages, and as a collective, I am interested in how they define objects and their meaning that exist within the moment. Search Engine Vision “Chair” organizes the first 1,000 videos of a YouTube search in a grid. The collection plays all at once allowing one to experience “chair”, defined by the masses.

 

SEV "Chair" was inspired by Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965. The installation has a photograph of a chair, a chair, and the dictionary definition of a chair placed next to one another. Which depiction of chair is most accurate? What happens if we ask the same of the socially defined chair of the masses? Does a clear definition emerge or is the meaning of chair lost?

 

My role of the artist in this works shifts to aggregator, collector, and/or curator, like the creators of the wonder cabinets of the Baroque-era, piecing together found objects and creating new combinations of form and content. As Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, the work is not about the material or the aesthetic qualities that make it art, but the questions they pose.