Matt Kenyon

2-18-16

On February 18th I attended an artist lecture that was given by artist Matt Kenyon.  Kenyon’s work focuses around the studies of work atmospheres and mass production, this work is also known as SWAMP.  Kenyon described most of his projects and what he was trying to achieve through these projects.  These projects mainly focused on the themes of addressing the effects of global corporate operations, mass media and communication, military- industrial complexes, and general meditations in the sense of life and artificial life.  Kenyon is a new media sculptor artist from Brooklyn and has work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, given TED talks, and has received a number of rewards.

The first project that Kenyon spoke about is his Consumer Index Project.  This project is essentially a performance that both submerges and speaks within nature. It is about how much people consume and how data is collected to then be traded with other corporations in order to build a consumer profile and predict future consumer behavior.  For this project Kenyon reconfigures a bar-code scanner and fuses it with a micro-video camera, which he then implants in his mouth by poking a hole through his cheek to connect a wire to the camera in his mouth.  He is now literally embodying the consumer profile that is represented by the data that he collects. Kenyon does this performance in a Walmart Superstore and as he continues to scan items he is essentially becoming more like the data broker collecting the information than he is like himself.

Kenyon talked about his project Cloud next during his lecture.  Cloud is a project that is meant to explore the abstract reality of local housing data and real estate speculation that continues even when there is a recent housing bubble, housing inflations.  The artwork itself is a cart with a house-shaped extrusion that releases a foamy stream of bubbles until a mechanical arm slices through the stream, letting the formation float into the air.  Each formation is slightly different from the next due to the mechanical arm being in time to when real-life real estate consumption intensifies. This project is also meant to show this data in the sense that anything that goes up must come down.  Helium is infused into the cloud and depending on the data the amount of helium, which then determines how high the formation floats when it is cut off from the main stream and how quickly it will come back down.  I really like this project in the sense of how it looked and the meaning behind it, because we all love bubbles and I always think it’s cool when bubbles are created in a way to make a shape.  This kind of thing has been done before, at the park, during a party, or just because people are having fun with the bubbles, but it is Kenyon’s purpose of the project that makes it stand out.  It is not just another person who is making cool bubble formations; there is a deeper meaning behind this simplicity of bubbles.

For Kenyon’s next project he sort of took most of us back to our childhoods when he asked if anyone ever had a Tamagotchi.  His project, called Tardigotchi, mixes this idea of the Tamagotchi and artificial life with a living organism.  The Tardigotchi is a brass sphere that contains an alife avatar seen on one side and on the other is a tardigrade that lives on a prepared slide.  A tardigrade is a common microorganism measuring half a millimeter in length.  The alife avatar is a caricature of the tardigrade and reflects its behavior and can even be fed. Each tardigrade, real and virtual, is taken care of simultaneously.  This caring for a virtual, and yet very real organism is about questioning one’s natural yearning for care and nurture, and whether it matters that this caring is exhibited towards something real or in a virtual reality.

Another of Kenyon’s project is his Giant Pool of Money.  Giant Pool of Money is a tall sculpture made of champagne glasses that represents specific sites that play an important role in oversight of the global financial system.  His work is about the impact of public faith in the economy and one’s personal fortune by continually negotiating between events in their own lives and that complex media that has constructed the image of our economy.  Cash can be deposited into a machine that then dispenses coins at the back onto a moving belt that brings them to the top of the tower of glasses. These coins from the machine are made of a material that melts at room temperature, which allows for the glasses to overfill and flow down the tower into the next row of glasses.  I really liked the concept and visual aspect of this piece of artwork.  Again, like the clouds, it is a familiar design with a deeper meaning behind the use of the glass pyramid tower and how things overflow and build up until it eventually collapses.

Some of Matt Kenyon’s other art projects include Puddle, Supermajor, and Notepad.  Notepad served as a sort of secret memorial during the war and has all of the victim’s names printed in micro text and serves as the lines of the paper. These names are Iraqi civilian deaths from the first three years of the Iraqi War.  This was a great lecture to attend and his projects were great to learn about and see as he showed them in his presentation.