Montage: Unmonumental Online
Digital material is never natural. It iseither generated or repurposed, and
always pre-inscribed with meaning. It settles in sediments, turning the Web
into a veritable billboard land: a frenetic free market in which corporations, private citizens, and fictional conglomerates all wave their own signs. It is a landscape rich with fiction, contradictions, and disjuncture. The new quickly becomes obsolete, and the old is continually revived. Internet-based montage, the assemblage of distinct materials into a new whole, is therefore both an inevitable and perpetual accident and an emerging, illuminating art form....
Montage is the final exhibition in Unmonumental: the Object in the
21st Century at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art.
Launch Project 
Guitar Solo Threeway (2006)
John Michael Boling's Guitar Solo Threeway (2006) offers a literal take on parallel montage in film, while placing three video sequences in simultaneity with each other. The videos are culled from YouTube and feature an extraordinarily common scene among posts to the popular Website: the guitar solo. The pieces are selected for their similarities. On the occasion of a user deleting one solo, it is promptly replaced with another, fished from a seemingly bottomless pool of such portraits. Much like the artist's Four Weddings and a Funeral, which features YouTube videos of exactly those things, this piece makes use of an important artistic tradition: the one-liner. Yet, in this case, the subjects of the video are just as engaged in the process of quotation as Boling is. As Boling's anonymous muses pose and strum before the camera, they recite and repurpose rock star fantasies, ubiquitous daydreams that come with their own genre conventions.
Born 1983, Rome, GA / Lives and works in Athens, GA. John Michael Boling is the creator of gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com and is a founding member of Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club.
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/jmboling
GENERAL URL:
gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/jmboling
GENERAL URL:
gooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com