BRATTLEBORO — The Center for Digital Art (CDA) will present an exhibition and talk by contemporary digital artist Matthew Ostrowski, who will highlight his current work to “re-process” and “re-synthesize” Hollywood films using unique computer algorithms.
In these videos, Ostrowski appropriates scenes from Hollywood films and uses computers to distort their narratives to create what he calls “a new order of visual and sonic information.”
The talk coincides with a free reception and refreshments to kick off an exhibition of Ostrowski's work on Friday, Dec. 13, from 7 until 11 p.m. The artist talk will take place from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
CDA will also host a special fundraiser reception with the artist from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., where donors can meet Ostrowski and enjoy some local wine, hors d'oeuvres, and desserts.
The exhibition will also be open to the public from 10 a.m until 6 p.m. on Dec. 14.
Working in video/audio installation, electronic music, and software development, Ostrowski has developed custom installations and software for Laurie Anderson, Elizabeth Streb, Bill T. Jones, and Martha Rosler, among other creative people.
An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been exhibited in New York City and internationally, Ostrowski received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Computer Arts in 2001 and an Independent Radio and Sound Art Fellowship from the Media Alliance in 2000. He was a nominee for the 2006 Alpert Award in the Arts. He has performed with the avant-noise band Krackhouse, and has appeared on more than a dozen recordings.
A different take
In his visit to CDA, Ostrowski will show and discuss two of his recent videos: his newest work, “The Unraveling,” a “reprocessing” of Alfred Hitchcock's “Rope” (1948), and “Scarlet(t)” from 2011, a somewhat different reconfiguring of “The Girl With a Pearl Earring” (2003), starring Scarlett Johansson.
As CDA explains at its website: “'Rope' is celebrated as a cinema landmark known for having been filmed in only eight extended takes. Ostrowski displays each of these takes on its own monitor, so that 'The Unraveling' simultaneously reinterprets the eight takes through the 'slitscan' technique, a digital effect which smears the action of a scene across the horizontal axis of the monitor.
“Images twist together as successive fragments of the scene overlap each other in wave after wave … in a fashion more suited to Picasso than Hitchcock.”
In “Scarlet(t),” the second video, Ostrowski focuses on Johansson's lips in “Pearl Earring” to create what is described by the CDA website as a critique on sexual politics in cinema.
Ostrowski uses computer technology to pull the actor's lips from each scene “and rearrange this imagery in different forms that obscure the other elements of the film,” according to the exhibit's press materials. “The result is that the objectification of the female star's sex appeal to attract an audience is laid bare.”
A multifaceted artist, Ostrowski has turned to video art only recently.
“My background is primarily in music composition, fixed media work, and improvised music,” he says. “Everything I do comes out of a musical context.”
Ostrowski says he has some background in musical theater (“although I am not speaking of things like 'Oklahoma'”).
“Beginning with my work with electronic music in the 1980s, my aesthetics spring from the computer-generated music developed in the 1950s and '60s,” he says.
“Five or six years ago, I began dabbling in video, partly because the technology has reached the point where my ideas in sound can now be executed in video,” he adds.
In addition to his video work in the vein of the CDA exhibit, Ostrowski believes that his work as an artist can be divided into two other categories.
“The first is purely sonic work, which included working with computer-generated electronic music,” he says.
The second is his installation work, where he uses the computer to control “mundane quotidian objects” - like a recent installation at Columbia, where he installed 18 florescent tubes that are controlled via a computer.
Another instillation, “Western Electric” (2012), is a “composition for an array of computer-controlled rotary telephones.”
The forms in all three of these categories might seem different and yet they are not, for each addresses “the central preoccupation of all my work, whether it be sonic, installation, or video - the manipulation of time,” Ostrowski says.
The ideas that underlie his videos resemble those in all his other work.
“The videos are manipulations derived from other materials - for instance, the Hollywood film,” Ostrowski says.
“I am interesting in taking cultural objects and using digital technology to bring out some aspect of them usually hidden, as in the case of film, that are often obscured by the power of narrative storytelling,” he describes.
“Consequently, I strive to create another language that is purely visual, by which I highlight material that we absorb unconsciously,” Ostrowski adds. “I want to make people aware of something they don't usually pay attention to.”
Ostrowski is drawn to video because here he can manipulate more than time. And technology is continually changing the reach of those possibilities.
“Thorough computer technology, images can be rearranged and configured to highlight what before was hidden,” Ostrowski points out.
For instance, he says, “Scarlet(t)” can much more blatantly make the point about viewers' voyeuristic fascination with the sensuality of Johansson's mouth and role it plays in the pleasure we take in watching “The Girl With a Pearl Earring.”
“Before the digital age, the smallest gram with which we could manipulate a film was the single frame, and within that lies the art of editing,” he says.
“But now the smallest frame is the pixel, so it is possible to intercut and refashion a motion picture on a pixel level,” Ostrowski adds. “Editing is about the manipulation of time. On the other hand, pixels are about both time and space.”