On Wednesday March 5th there was a New Media Lecture given by Torsten Burns. Burns is a video artist who is currently a visiting professor for this college. He makes highly saturated and fantastic videos, which include themes such as collaboration, space training, medicine, future technologies, the human body and zombies. In addition to his video art Burns also works with sculpture and performance art. Much of his work includes complex and futuristic computer graphics.
He has done residency work in both EYEBEAM and The Experimental Television center in New York. He has also won awards and participated in many media festivals with his works. The videos were often visually interesting and disturbing at the same time. I found some of the content in the videos hard to understand and I often was not sure what the point of most of their videos were.
Collaboration plays a very important role in most of Burn’s work. He influenced the audience to one day go to the Experimental TV center so that we could work and learn with other people (This is actually something that I would like to do one day). It is so important to him that the lecture was entitled “Collabotronica”. He collaborated with many other artists for various fields. Her works with dancers, his own family, videographers, and visual artists for his work. One can see a blending and different points of view for many different art fields in his pieces.
Another theme that I noticed in Burn’s work is the interactions between the human body and technology. This theme was displayed with his explorations into a re-imagined space-training program. The videos within this theme reminded me of the cyborgs from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. In this series of work Burns dressed up in modified space suits and created activities that seemed like space training. One video showed a man who was attached to a small rocket launcher. It was like the launcher was a part of him and he was part man and part machine.
Burns’s uses highly saturated colors and bizarre digital effects to create his videos. The colors in his videos are so distorted and unpleasant, that they are almost sickening. He also shows disturbing imagery and strange happenings. There are people spinning around and dancing in strange ways. Much of what was shown seemed very unnatural and far removed from the realm of the natural world. I felt uncomfortable during most of the lecture.
Another important aspect of Burn’s work is his incorporation of his videos and the music that he chooses. I found it amusing that one of the songs that he chose was “Barbie Girl” by Aqua. All of the songs seemed synthetic and deeply involved with technology. The music complimented the videos and made them seem more strange and sometimes reminded me of a video game. Even thought much of what Burns created did not actually function, the music made it seem more real.
I had mixed feelings about this lecture. Though I did not understand the point of some of the works, his videos were visually appealing and contained some compelling content. It was interesting to see someone else’s unique view of what they think about technology.
For more information and examples of work go to:
http://mysite.verizon.net/holyokeresearcher/
http://holyokeresearch.blogspot.com/
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