jeremy couillard
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05102013

MY TIME IN THE CULT OF MELTING ANCESTORS

Show up at Louis B James from April 21st until May 31, 2013

Floor 1: An installation of paintings, kinetic sculpture and dioramas built around a 20ish minute video that takes place in the space you observe it in. Kinetics react to the video and are all controlled by a plinth in the center.

JC_upstairs-instal-5

JC_upstairs-install-1

Floor 2: A beeping meditation room that is activated by pushing a red button. A mandala begins to spin, 6 screens light up and start beeping. The viewer is invited to use the beeps and images for meditation.

JC_downstairs-lights

JC_downstairs-no-lights

Some images I have so far:

The press release is an essay on Super Mario:

A Japanese playing card company, loosely translated as Leave Luck to Heaven, develops a video game based around a new mythology where its participants become two Italian plumber brothers, who, by undergoing a Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey through giant green pipes, are transported to a realm of evil turtle beings and anthropomorphic mushrooms. They discover in themselves god-like powers through plants, fungi and astral guidance, as they travel through realms, or worlds, under, on, and above ground. Dark worlds, day worlds, ice worlds, worlds on treetops, worlds underwater. The brothers can break brick walls with their heads, jump on bullets, walk through walls and go down hidden tubes; they accumulate coins to purchase their reincarnation and climb secret plants hidden in boxes to walk on clouds. In lava-soaked, labyrinthine brick castles they battle giant turtle soldiers in order to rescue a human princess, who is always in another castle and replaced with a mushroom man. They finally find her in the 8th world, after completing something perhaps similar to the Buddhist 8-fold path. 

Mario is the first hero created in the computational realm. At his core he is binary numbers, code, and logic gates. He is electrons travelling through a Ricoh 2A03 8-bit processor. Through all of us he was brought to life by manipulating an early Christian symbol of the cross and two red Japanese suns on a controller hooked up to a minimalist grey box reminiscent of Robert Morris plugged into a glass tube of deflection coils and electron guns. Children sat in dark rooms engaged in the first of many computational cultist rituals under the glow of the cathode containing images of the plumber hero who could be almost telepathically controlled. Soon Mario embarked on a myriad of adventures to new worlds: riding egg-eating baby dragons; battling robed ghosts, naked ghosts, and other increasingly complex enemies. Then Game Boy came out: the first portable computational mythology. Soon after, Mario discovered the mathematical third dimension, began jumping through paintings to enter his worlds. He climbed mountains, went to new planets and galaxies, discovered computational gravity, and began to collect crystals along with coins. 

Mario is an analog for lo-fi spirituality and digital age mysticism. His cosmology is every bit as cryptic as the Popol Vuh, as Vedic rituals or symbolic flesh eating, though from the beginning his story is one we don’t believe but in which we are every bit as invested.

04012013

My Apocalypse Fantasy installation at Red Bull Music Academy.

apoc_install

 

apoc5

03032013

dioramas_all_web

Little dioramas in EMT conduit boxes.  The switch up top turns on a little LED to illuminate the scene.

Details:

02122013

Paintings on plexiglass. 18″x24″ with brushed aluminum standoffs.

artifact_pyramid_web

palm_artiface_web

01302013

Here is a trailer for a 20ish minute video I’ve been working on since around May 2012. It will premiere at Louis B James gallery on April 21st along with an installation built around it. After the show I’ll put the whole thing online.

12022012

PMMA-302412x, 2012; plexiglas, acrylic and oil glazes on wood, glass, fake plants, acrylic on foam, embedded video; 136 x 30 x 33″

This is a kinetic sculpture for Louis B James at NADA in Miami next week. It’ll be at booth P3 so stop by and check it out if you’re down there.

For the nerdy: I used an atmega 328p with Arduino bootloader. Pretty simple program that just times the motors to be in sync with the video. Had to learn about decoupling motors from the circuit so there are capacitors all over the place. Below is a video of everything in action. When the viewer is going into the temples, the wheels spin away; when the viewer is going out from the temples, the wheels spin toward you. The idea for this started with Flusser saying “silly telemetic gadget.” I started to wonder what the gadgets he was calling for might look like, or what I wanted them to look like. Our gadgets now are so pretty but often just huge distractions rather than serving what Flusser would call dialogical functions . So I thought I would make a gadget that was pretty but also strange and a bit mystical whose purpose is to serve no purpose other than be what it is.

12012012

Made a wooden box with a landscape inside it to hold a video edition of My Apocalypse Fantasy. Those black tubes are flash drives. You can take them with you when the end times come.

 

09022012

Two Male Plug 2012, acrylic on paper, 18″x24″

House, 2012, acrylic on paper, 18″x24″

Chair, 2012, acrylic on paper, 18″x24″

Boat, 2012, acrylic on paper, 18″x24″

Just moved into a new studio in Sunset Park. Had to do some little paintings to get going.

06062012

Made some prints. Here is what they look like in my studio:

This one was printed on billboard material. It’s 44″x20″

These were printed on an Epson and wedged between two sheets of plexi for framing.

This is the original file:

06052012

Black Hole Memory, single channel looping video.

I made this with the Cryengine. I haven’t played Crysis in years, don’t have it anymore, but I guess you could add this level and play it. Here is a dropbox link that will work for awhile. There is no spawn point in the level, though so I guess you would need to add that. Also you may or may not need my custom objects that I added. If anyone really wants to play this level and can’t get the file to play, let me know I’d be happy to get it working.

06042012

Chair, Mountain, Cell Floor, 30″x22″, acrylic on paper, 2012

05122012

Dip, Sparkle, Turn, Pull, Repeat, 38″x40″x72″, plexi and electronics on wooden plynth

Almost all the materials for this sculpture were purchased in Chinatown. I bought these gems from some magical stone shops on Walker and Center streets. When I buy them the lady there always tells me “Good luck!”

This is the board I put together to run the mechanisms. It’s an Atmega328 with Arduino bootloader. Then some relays to run the motors. If you’re curious about the code, here is it.

This is the bottom gem that flickers when the other gem is raised to its highest.

This thing was so hard to document. Hopefully this video makes it a little more clear what it is. It goes up, it goes down, it spins around, and then I programmed it to do a few little tricks every now and again.

05112012

Install shots from Columbia MFA thesis show:

I built a wooden projector with spinning wheels to project my animation.

05102012

Futuristic Waiting Room, 96″x48″, Acrylic, mirror-plexi, collage on panel, 2012

05092012

My Apocalypse Fantasy

10min, single channel video loop, 2012. Made with Cinema4d, sound with xtranormal robot and AudioMulch.

Best to watch this in Vimeo as I can’t do HD from my webpage right now.

03152012

This is a video that will be projected out of a sculpture for an upcoming show (details in the post below). It’s part of a bigger installation that I’m working on right now. Probably just go watch it in HD on vimeo. It won’t let me embed HD here. (click on the HD letters in the video)

03012012

Getting ready for this.

01182012

A Perfect Science, 2012, acrylic on panel, 48″x48″

I spend a lot of time in oncology clinic waiting rooms. I have this one fantasy that cancer is cured and the plants that they use to make chemotherapy drugs sprout out from the toxic liquids in an abandoned waiting room. This is a pacific yew tree growing out of the drug Taxol.

01072012

Movie Poster for the Secret Adventure of Franz Mesmer, 2012, acrylic on paper, 24″x32″

1022012

Here is a video I made for the awesome Rip CD (ripcd.bandcamp.com/)