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Jeremy Bailey and Antoine Catala are two artists who have both taken
interest in the webcam as a medium and a subject, from divergent
perspectives. Bailey, who lives in Toronto, creates webcam
performances in which he manipulates animated models while spinning
out monologues with a nerdy lack of self-awareness --both excessive,
even grotesque, challenges to assumptions of
transparency in screen and self. Recently, Bailey has been
experimenting with thought-controlled technology, devices that respond
to readings of their users' brainwaves, to imagine one extreme that
future telecom technology might take and to satirize art-critical
cliches about the uniqueness of the artist's mind and works that make
the artist's process transparent. Catala, a French artist based in New
York, has made sculptures using television as readymade, a treatment
of the medium that applies to the material of the monitor as much as
it does to the images of whatever channel it happens to be tuned to.
For Catala, lifecasting -- the practice of non-stop transmission of
oneself via webcam -- represents both the movement of broadcast
technology from the professional studio to the home as well as a
concentrated instance of the constant self-design and performance that
the social internet requires -- a demand that he, like most artists
who make their work available online for market and exhibition
systems, feels particularly acutely. On June 24, Bailey and Catala
will present new works drawing on these recent areas of study. This event is curated by Brian Droitcour.