“BNC B” by Martin Reiche
Title:
- BNC B
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
- ISEA2016: 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More artworks from ISEA2016:
Venue(s):
Creation Year:
- 2015
Medium:
- BNC tee connectors, DVD players, TV screens, video amplifiers, cables.; contains two single-channel videos
Artist Statement:
Beyond Non-deterministic Connections Version B (BNC B) is a sculptural network of Bayonet NeillConcelman (BNC) tee connectors and a two-channel video installation. Serving as a monumental analog video mixer, BNC B is also a statement and metaphor for global connectedness. With its sharp 90 degree angles its structure developed out of the aesthetics of L-systems, a class of generative algorithms that have widely been used in the modelling of plants and recursive processes and are representative for the governance of algorithms and data today.
As a combination of sculpture, installation and video art, BNC B is blurring the genre boundaries of current electronic art. Two DVD players and two small flat screen TVs are connected through video amplifiers to a sculptural network of 400 BNC tee connectors that topologically form a tree. Through their connections, the two video signals are mixed analogically, creating effects of colorful distortion and glitch. The two videos running on the DVD players are video works in their own respect, each between two and four minutes in length, consisting of footage taken from the artist’s video archive: all samples have been taken in public spaces in Brazil (Sao Paulo), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Germany (Berlin) and Poland (Warsaw) between 2013 and 2015, feeding the notion of a space in which meaningful inter-human connections can be established. In direct contrast, the almost surgical but still organiclooking sculpture in the middle of the installation serves as a metaphor not only for global connectedness through electronic circuits in its manifold forms, but also as a metaphor for the (usually invisible) inner wirings of modern day technology.
While the complete structure is visible to the spectator, its fractal-like appearance, which could have been the result of a Lindenmayer system generator with 90 degree angles, seems hard to trace. Even though being a completely deterministic system without any method of interaction by the spectator, BNC B produces highly colorful and always changing outputs that are seemingly random, but follow a very welldefined pattern that is only determined by the luma and chroma values of the composite video signals being mixed as well as the alignment of the two signals in the time-dimension.
