Hindsight is Always 20/20 takes the State of the Union address from each presidency and sorts them according to word frequency, generating a Snellen eye chart for each president, with the more frequent words in larger typeface at the top of the chart and the less frequent words towards the bottom. The 66-member word lists for each presidency are designed to draw out the most unique and contemporary vocabulary used by the president in his speeches; words that appear in the majority of speeches (e.g. "united", "states", "the", "his", "her", "am") are cancelled out, as are any words that appear in a previous administration's chart. As a result, the list contains words that are not only important in a given presidency but also au courant in terms of lexicon and contemporary context. The forty-one presidencies to have State of the Union addresses (William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, alas, died before they could submit a message to Congress) each have their own eye chart. Additional eye chart information appears in the margins concerning the use of the chart as a testing device. The aim of the piece is to make a statement about the perennial political metaphor of vision, without which much of the rhetoric of presidential politics quickly deflates. The choice of words employed by a given presidential administration to articulate its message is in many ways its signature. Looking back, we can use this vocabulary to test the metaphorical eyesight of the nation.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began hosting awards ceremonies (the "Oscars") in 1927. The award for Best Picture evolved over the first three years into an annual distinction unparalleled in the film industry. Academy allows us to explore the temporal, formal, and aesthetic progression of the first seventy-five years of the Academy awards by taking each film and compressing, sound and picture, into a single minute. In addition, the piece attempts to interrogate issues of film canon by presenting the Best Picture winners in chronological order in a massively condensed timeframe. Using frame averaging and time-lapse phonography, the entirety of the film is present in this highly abbreviated snapshot. Repeat viewing of the entire piece allows the viewer not only to see cinematic history unfolding, but also to see formal tropes in cinematography, editing, and music direction exposed through the massive acceleration of temporal scale employed by the piece.
BIO R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia's Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling'74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling'74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City. |
