Michael Takeo Magruder
Michael Takeo Magruder is an American artist based in the UK working with
New and Technological Media within Contemporary Arts practice.
Works
Work 1
Title: Continuum…year of production: 2007
used technology (software etc): Flash, Java (server-side)
short work description
Continuum reflects upon the evolution of our collective history through the
real-time analysis of global news information networks. As no event
transpires in isolation, each moment of our existence is defined by the sum
of an infinite number of interconnected occurrences. Given that no
individual can absorb and process the totality of this information, how can
we obtain an informed notion of the present?
Source Material:
(images and texts) Headline news articles from the live BBC internet news
service sampled and recombined in real-time.
(audio) Manipulated sample from päike ja jää by Cloudspeak.
Work 2
Title: Re_collection
year of production: 2005
used technology (software etc): Flash, mobile phone
short work description
The desire to be remembered has always been a part of the human condition.
Society has forever sought to devise a form of memory that would outlast our
corporeal selves. The adaptation of binary, the universal language and
cornerstone of the digital system, has afforded us yet another path towards
attaining this most elusive of aspirations.
Binary systems and their descendent technologies now permeate the entirety
of our social strata. They coexist with us, in our hands, at all times and
in all places. We sample, organise and archive, creating personal
repositories of our recorded lives. We distribute these, our digitised
memories, trading fragments of our most intimate experiences with strangers.
Human memory is stored in machine memory, retrievable in an instant, while
networks facilitate the juxtaposition and blending of these finite
narratives.
Do individuals inherently seek to place their personal accounts, each
transient and subtly unique, within a universal context? Are the instruments
we create to mediate this process intrinsically imbued with such underlying
intentions?
Re_collection is the product of one of our most ubiquitous technologies –
the mobile phone. A captured moment, precious and instilled with personal
significance, provides the exclusive source material for the artwork. The
recorded sequence – stripped of resolution and apparent depth, has become
depersonalised, reduced to a minimalist aesthetic that reveals archetypal
forms and the inherent emotions they evoke. Through this purposeful paring
back of detail, the divisions between personal and universal are questioned.
It is a search to reveal the underlying ‘truth’ to, these, our most intimate
of recollections that exist between dream and remembrance.
Process:
[ 08.05.2005 : Hyde Park, London, UK ] A subject was recorded without
direction utilising only a SPV c500 smartphone as a cinematic device. From
the resulting material a single 14 second audio/video stream was extracted
and used (with only minor editing/manipulation) as the exclusive source
material for the artwork.