derek w. stoops [ portfolio ]

works | statement | resume | contact

An accepted mantra of socio-cultural ideas rearranged correctly resonates those ideas exponentially out of their established expectations thereby generating overtones of transient critical introspection.

Much of the content of my work refutes the received notions of a centralized distribution of information through the reorganization of the end-user interface. To address push technologies such as broadcast television successfully I must be both a self-aware recipient of the pushed information and a critical observer of the cultural effects that are produced in those around me. At the outermost tier of this streaming information hierarchy is where I interject my observations. I physically redirect the original vector of the media stream so that attention is focused on the socio-cultural implications of our conditioned perception. Repetitive memento mori words are used by the local television news programs to attract viewers by disseminating a sense of localized mortal urgency. This universal manipulation of the fear of death, particularly a violent death, is what currently creates the local news dependency. These micro-media events are in turn distilled and magnified in Earth Beneath (2004) as a comparison illustrative of what I see as parallel aspects to certain religious institution’s methodologies. I attempt to disrupt the intended results by bringing to the foreground the thinly veiled mechanisms of our manipulation to which we have let ourselves become entranced.

I enjoy working with the idea of potential conflict wherein no presumption of an absolute solution is offered. I can only call attention to ideas within my sphere of understanding, however small and fluctuating that sphere may be. Many influential individuals such as politicians, corporate CEOs and clergy use the socio-cultural authority of their respective organizations to manipulate the individual for purposes of continuing their personal and institutional expansion of wealth and influence. With the advent of modern marketing practices becoming more specific in their approach to targeted audiences, advertising has become a conduit though which not just products, but agendas are pushed. My installation Deus Ex Machina (2006) peels the visual gloss off the audible words and examines the inherent conflict of verbally listed side effects of prescription drugs from the concurrent pleasing imagery. My goal is to present art works that explore media culture in ways that produce self-awareness in the viewer of the relation he or she plays to the producers of contemporary media advertising.

The television set remains a constant and dispersed presence in our landscape. These information distribution nodes function as ever-present transducers pulling sound and image seemingly out of nowhere. Our concerns regarding these domestic objects are never about the objects themselves, but rather what is coming through them. The hyper constructed realities presented on the spatially compressed format of the screen create an extremely artificial world. Manufacturers cover the internal workings of these devices with slick exteriors while editors and directors configure the content so the final presentation minimizes the television’s objectness thus distracting the viewer from what the medium actually is: a physical conduit of manipulation. The type these tele-visions allow us to see is one of tunnel vision. I hope my manipulation of the medium collapses the supporting structures of the tunnel before we ever enter it bringing our focus back into the room with the glowing box.

There is more energy generated by the glow of a television or the ring of a cell phone than just the apparent explicable sensory information. There is an invisible energy as well, both in the literal distribution sense and in the technological sublime. A cumulative effect is built up from the flow of thousands of radio, cellular and television towers all simultaneously broadcasting their signals. We live in a society that is increasingly using pull-information systems like the Internet and narrowcasting cable TV, global positioning satellites and cellular telephone networks. However, the fact remains that almost the entirety of the United States exists within distribution fields of the established broadcast stations. All cellular phone conversations, TV sitcoms, news programs, televangelism channels, talk-radio stations, and advertisements are invisibly passing though us on their way to the end-user device whether we are tuned in or not. I think that this saturation creates an unconscious cultural awareness of what it means to be human at this time in our development. All these images are floating around us are in fact images of us. I think this technological narcissism is present in the feedback loops that generate things like our popular culture, our news dependency and our general need for ever more current information. These systems respond to cultural expressions such as our desires created by advertising and then recycle them back to us. It is at the nodal points in these fields of fragmented and solidified information where I position my art so as to apply my filters of interpretation to the streams of media culture.

I alter broadcast information before it reaches the end-user by recording, analyzing and filtering the signal path of source material. Pulling a television out of its customary location and rearranging both the physicality of the device and its content becomes necessary in order to bridge the connections between the original and the repurposed structure and content. Reconstructing these invisible information energies into objects and spaces in order to represent them in our limited spectrum of light and sound allows the viewer a heightened sense of self in relation to our media-rich environment. I hope the viewer will combine the situational object awareness of the displaced television set with the distilled and amplified information coming through the installation space into a unified state of critical perception.