zach blas
ARCHIVE
This is an archive of previous works (2004 – 2008) that investigate processes of technological mediation and abstraction on human bodies. The works attend to the styles and methods in which these technological processes reconfigure the human sensorium and its meaning-making capacities, considering technological transformations in being, thinking, dreaming, sex acts, desire, despair, longing, violence, and death.
video mummy (2004)
Blank videotape covers a mannequin. The sculpture responds to medial impacts on human form and the shapes of our media bodies. video mummy is the undead of information culture.
life pulses (2004)
A camera is pointed at a blank analog video monitor and detects the cathrode-ray scanning process, an act typically not perceivable during everyday television spectatorship. Similar to medical equipment that reveals biometric information on bodies, such as heart rate or temperature, the camera exposes “life pulses” of the monitor.
push the red button (2006)
Wikipedia defines the “big red button” as a device used to launch nuclear weapons. It also refers to an authority figure as “having his/her finger on the button” and notes that the red button is symbolic for “self-destruct.” push the red button is an interactive installation that examines collective meanings of technological control, ideology, and mass destruction. Participants are presented with a large, illuminated red button, emblematic of a such big red buttons of control or destruction. When pressed, the button retrieves a phrase from a Google search on “push the red button,” “push my red button,” or “the red button.” While the participant is placed within the realm of the authority figure by pushing the red button, they are simultaneously denied the ability to have control of this act because the Google search visual display is random. Confronted with war, control, freedom, and sexuality, participants are left to question the ubiquity of pushing the red button in the cultural imaginary.
photocopies (2004)
Nine photographs of mannequin parts are photocopied, beginning with an original and continuing by photocopying a copy of a copy of a copy. Each photograph is copied nine times, resulting in 81 photocopies. As the image is continuously photocopied, it reaches a tone stability; some body parts disappear quickly into black while others remain in abstract globs of white. photocopies asks where is the body in the image when technological mediation appears to have disappeared the figure. Why do some body parts remain visible, while others are erased?
The Hole(s) of Non-Teleology (2006)
The Hole(s) of Non-Teleology is an interactive video installation that examines video feedback and queer acts of anal fisting. Live video feedback is set up in a space and projected onto a wall. Based on the number of participants listening to the headphones, the video feedback projection and audio become interrupted and disturbed with videos of anal fisting and audio feedback. The piece oscillates from a technological abstraction of queer sexuality to a “group sex act” between installation and participants. The Hole(s) of Non-Teleology poses the possibilities of a queer technology, suggesting that a formal and technical relation exists between video feedback and anal fisting.
Level_Zero: Software Solutions for Un-Becoming (2008, with Michael Kontopoulos)
Level_Zero is a response to massively multiplayer online games’ gold farming economy. While gamers that purchase from gold farming businesses desire to avoid hours of playing so that they may obtain immediate high-ranking positions in MMORPG games (such as World of Warcraft), Level_Zero inverts the obsession to advance in these games by offering options that allow users to willfully move backwards and acquire less, such as Perpetual Death, Backwards Playing, and Rupture Hacks.
tv pillow (2004)
Video static is projected onto a pillow. Where a head would rest, there is now scrambled, empty signals of information transmission. tv pillow awaits the head that will sleep on it, filling its frenetic signals with thoughts and dreams.
the operation (2004)
A mannequin is split in two and surrounded by a series of probing cameras and television monitors. The mannequin, itself an abstraction of the human body, is undergoing a medial operation or examination. While the mannequin is typically thought of as a rendition of the outer surface of the human, the operation records, or extracts, the “insides” of the mannequin and presents this on a series of monitors, giving the mannequin’s newfound depth a new surface, which is the video monitor.
environment #1 (2004)
With the use of a video delay and video static projection, participants find themselves captured on a television monitor, producing random patterns of audio feedback. As they watch a mediated, time-lapsed version of themselves seemingly lost in video static, participants are confronted with the relationalities their physical bodies and media bodies share or lack.
