Carter Johnson
Adjunct Professor

algorithm, 2019, video

algorithm from Carter Johnson on Vimeo.

This piece is a reconsideration of Richard Serra’s “Color Aid” from 1971. In his piece, he thumbs through a stack of Color Aid paper, shot from above with a camera and the duration of which was determined by the time it took him to go through all 314 pages.

Using an iPad, I swipe through a digitized version of Color Aid paper. Unlike the soundtrack of Serra’s which consists simply of the sounds produced by his actions thumbing through the pages, I apply a found digital ‘laugh track,’ which complicates the nature and status of the object and its image, particularly with regard to digital and social media.

😀 [smiley emoji] (after Richard Serra), 2019, video

🙂 [smiley emoji] from Carter Johnson on Vimeo.

Each day, for the first few minutes upon entering my studio for over a year, I made something and shot the process with my video camera. Sometimes I played with paint, sometimes it was clay, or other tactile arts and crafts materials such as glitter and glue, and other times it was a digital production. Truthfully, it could have been anything I decided to do on that day in that moment. The only rules were that it had to incorporate the color green and take less than 5 minutes to complete. I then overlaid the video clips and used a chromakey algorithm to remove the color green from the clips rendering those areas transparent or translucent.

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