Art Exhibit Visit on 04/30/11

Artist: Graham Parker
Exhibit: The Confidence Man
At the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) --- RPI

"His work considers contemporary digital phenomena against the historic contexts and antecedents from which they emerged—often finding unexpected, even uncanny connections between these different moments and modes."

Graham Parker

Graham Parker is a New York artist and does film and audio work. He has always been interested in "spectrality", which is defined here as the concealing of one set of operations behind the appearance of another. Most of the work in this show, The Confidence Man, is united by an interest in presenting objects that have the look or texture of something recognizable (a newspaper, a neon sign, an ATM, a documentary, etc...) but which at second glance have crucial elements missing or distorted, so that our "confidence" in them is undermined. 

Hacked ATM machine, part of  the The Confidence Man exhibit

EMPAC

He works to create artwork that is built to "survive a mere glance", and cites the subject of computer spam as a comparison. Filtering this material requires a type of vigilance about who and what to trust. Parker's aim is to have us extend this vigilance into other areas of our daily lives...in order to see objects and forms for what they are, not as they should be. Technology tends to arrive with ideological systems and claims in tow. The confidence man and the spammer say, "This is what they claim, but this is what they do." In Parker's work, the challenge to us is not to accept the claims and systems of information technology at face value -- but to be 'delinquent' -- to expose what is inherent, rather than what is advertised. 

EMPAC on the inside -- Concert Hall

Artist's website:  http://www.grahamparker.info/cv.html

EMPAC website:  

 http://empac.rpi.edu/