Montage: Unmonumental Online

Digital material is never natural. It is
either 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

Time-Lapse Homepage (2003)
Paul Slocum's Time-Lapse Homepage (2003) signifies through accretion. This high-definition video is composed of 1,000 computer screenshots of his homepage. Complete with an upbeat score that could easily be a corporate jingle to promote a new technology, the stills display the building, erosion, and occasional complete overhaul of an ever-evolving Web site. This work provides a layered historical record of something we tend to see only in discrete units-the appearance of a homepage on any given day-while attempting to think through Web design in the language of earlier time-based media.
Born 1974, Dallas, TX / Lives and works in Dallas, TX Paul Slocum is a musician and new media artist. Computers and computer culture are often the medium and subject of his work. He is also half of the Tree Wave project that makes music and video with obsolete assembly-language-programmed computer and video game gear. Some of Paul's performances and exhibitions include Transitio MX (Mexico City), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY), Deitch Projects (NY), Eyebeam (NY), Le Confort Moderne (France), README 2005 (Denmark), and The Liverpool Biennial.

PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/slocum

MAIN URL:
qotile.net