[spectre] Paul B. Davis at Seventeen, London

[Heather Corcoran]

PAUL B. DAVIS [BEIGE]
DEFINE YOUR TERMS (OR KANYE WEST FUCKED UP MY SHOW)
WEDNESDAY 27TH MAY - SATURDAY 4TH JUL 2009
PRIVATE VIEW - Thursday 28th May



www.seventeengallery.com
17 KINGSLAND ROAD LONDON E2 8AA

Paul B. Davis' probing, contemplative second solo show at SEVENTEEN 
represents a bold step forward for the artist...though not necessarily 
one he expected to take. It was instigated by a semi-voluntary rejection 
of a practice that, until very recently, was central to his creative 
output and figured prominently in his debut exhibition at the gallery - 
Intentional Computing (2007). A curious turn of events led to this 
unforeseen repudiation and redefinition of practice:

'I woke up one morning in March to a flood of emails telling me to look 
at some video on YouTube. Seconds later saw I Kanye West strutting 
around in a field of digital glitches that looked exactly like my work. 
It fucked my show up...the very language I was using to critique pop 
content from the outside was now itself a mainstream cultural reference.'

Contentiously dubbed 'datamoshing', (or 'compression aesthetics', as 
Davis prefers to describe it), this practice ultimately emerged out of 
artefacts inherent in the compression algorithms of digitally 
distributed media. Davis seized upon the glitchy pixellation that is 
often present while viewing YouTube clips or Digital TV, and repurposed 
it as a tool of cultural rupture. Alongside other artists such as Paper 
Rad, Sven Konig and Takeshi Murata, he engaged this effect as a tool for 
aestheticized intervention, a fresh framework for analysis, and a new 
visual language.

In contemporary culture, mainstream media pilfering of independent 
artistic production is expected. Moreover, it's a generative force - 
renegade practice and/or methodology is forced into evolution by the 
appropriation of its pioneering techniques. But for Davis this perhaps 
inevitable incorporation by Kanye West, the self proclaimed 'voice of 
this generation', served as a trigger to directly engage his growing 
concern that current artistic methods for grappling with digital culture 
- hacks, remixes, and 'mash-ups' among them - are ill-equipped for 
sustaining serious and self-reflexive critical examination. As Davis has 
commented, 'These methods generate riffs...restatements or celebrations 
of existing cultural behaviours, and artists who use them are seemingly 
unable to either offer incisive alternatives or generate new cultural 
forms. I was one of these artists, making these riffs, and I'd come to 
realize their limitations.'

Define Your Terms (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show) concerns Davis' 
attempt to understand, react to, and depart from this crossroads. The 
works in the exhibition, many of which disavow his previous modes of 
hacking or mashing-up existing digital artefacts, have all been produced 
in the past two months, and will instead propose some alternate 
strategies for provocatively getting under the skin of Civilisation 2.0.

In Codec (2009), Davis' created his own proprietary video 
compression/decompression algorithm, free of now-standardized templating 
and presets. This algorithm is - defiantly - unavailable for commercial 
use. With Critical Space Headgear (2009) a head-mounted video camera is 
fed to a head-mounted display, the resolution of camera output and 
viewed input being reduced to 320x200 pixels thereby creating a 
self-mediated 'reality' that's flattened in real-time to the same 
dimensions as YouTube. In The Symbol Grounding Problem (2009) Davis 
simultaneously ingests a bacon sandwich while defecating in a perspex 
box as philosopher Luciano Floridi narrates the viewer through what they 
see onscreen as the interaction of dynamic informational entities. 
Floridi asserts that as we move closer towards the singularity - the 
future point in which human consciousness merges with the consciousness 
of our machinic progeny - our own experiential trajectory in the 
physical world will become secondary to the interaction of 
informationally-modeled simulacrum. This inevitable futurity is 
reinforced while experiencing the most base, mundane of bodily functions 
- simply taking a poo.

In this way, the works in this show are built. They are constructed out 
of whole cloth. There are no naive uses of technology here as they turn 
away from seemingly arbitrary, uninterrogated appropriation of 
digi-cultural artefacts and seek to offer alternative strategies for 
taking on the protocols of new media. In essence, Define Your Terms (or 
Kanye West Fucked Up My Show) is an exhibition about Davis breaking free 
from his own creative paradigm and setting forth a revivified agenda. 
Through radical reevaluation of his process, Davis has offered some new 
approaches for tackling the hovering questions that are relentlessly 
generated by this - our age of over-caffeinated cultural cycles, empty 
signifiers, and supreme technological oversaturation.

Kanye West's recent video for his track Welcome To Heartbreak (2009):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgZRU7360O8

Compression Study #1 (Untitled data mashup) by Paul B. Davis [BEIGE] and 
Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad), 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWG5jqzYsEI

Compression Study #4 (barney) by Paul B. Davis [BEIGE], 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iRKxK6suF0


BIO

Lives and works in London, UK. Founded the BEIGE Programming Ensemble 
with Joe Beuckman, Cory Arcangel and Joseph Bonn. While still in college 
in the late 90s Davis pioneered the use of hacked video game cartridges 
as an art practice. His Nintendo work was premiered in 2000 and 
subsequently BEIGE members used hacked NES systems to create a distinct 
body of work that has been shown internationally. Davis created The 
BEIGE Cassette Jockey Championships, the world's only cassette 
tape-based performance competition, and performing as 'DJ Spin-Laden' is 
the only DJ to ever get thrown off stage at the Technics/DMC World DJ 
Championships. Recent projects include solo exhibitions in Milan and 
Chicago, performing music and wizardy in a duo with DJ LeDeuce [Thrill 
Jockey] known as The Potions, and DJ'ing in the elevator of the Akademie 
der Kunste, Berlin. Currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths 
College, working on his Ph.D, and producing beats for St. Louis rapper 
'Wonton'.