Hello World
Christopher Bakers piece Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise interests me on many levels. Upon approaching the piece I was overwhelmed by the visual and aural stimuli I was presented with. Chris managed to create a landscape of thousands of videos that leads one on a journey of experience. Hmm what do I mean by that sentence? I believe that the experience of this piece is always shifting -- one can attempt to view one video at a time-enjoy the videos as a whole - enjoy the audio- one may chose to look at this piece as a texture Chris has created tiling the white wall in the nash gallery. All of these experiences and more come from this single piece.
What really excited me about the work was the apprehensions I initially experienced when viewing the videos. I felt as though I was evading these peoples privacy looking into their bedrooms and offices. After a moment of unease I realized that these videos are all harvested from YouTube - they are intended to be public for the public to view... This transition from apprehension to acceptance lead me to think of the second part of the title How I learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise
I mentioned above the texture that this piece creates on the wall. I found this to be very interesting. The varying brightness levels of the videos creates a depth it seems as though one could walk into these gaps that have been created on the white walls. Another interesting visual texture that is created can be experienced when you are close to the wall looking down the piece. It seems as though the videos are shingles on a roof--- they have a 3D layered quality to them. These visual tricks remind me that we too, like the poor Mac computer, need to process this information, and sometimes the overwhelming stimuli can trick our minds.
If anyone is interested in revisting this project Chris has it documented here Hello World... Documentation