The Club
The Club is a moving-image digital collaging of 57 images of selected North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths from the eighties till the present. There’s also a linked slideshow of some stills from the video.
The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO’s who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.
So it’s a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others’ deformities.
Here’s what Andy Warhole said about The Club: “they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are — this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies… but not them — this is new — and of course i love your politics 
”
Much of the work I’ve done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There’s other work I’ve done with dbCinema here.
Tags: computer art | generative art | Jim Andrews | politics | programming | video
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4 Responses to “The Club”.
This is the best thing you’ve done, Jim. Truly scary. But you should revise the intro text, it seems to me a bit politically shallow. Maybe that’s quibbling, At least get rid of the sentence fragments (“Via…”).
I don’t really find any media scary, Brian. Some media is creepy, though. Perhaps The Club is creepy. However, to me, it’s interesting that the creepiest moment is when Dick Cheney’s face appears more or less complete and without superimposition among other pics. His mouth out-psychos the psychos and he is looking up, seemingly cursing what he looks up at. It took the rest of The Club to really bring out how telling that pic of Cheney is. Dick Cheney is the Lon Chaney of the piece.
Osama bin Laden is dead, but Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld will never be hunted down or even imprisoned for starting the Iraq war with lies to the USAmerican people and the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
You sound quite sure, as usual, when you say “This is the best thing you’ve done”. Different people would have different opinions on the matter, I expect.
And thanks for the advice about the text, Brian. I’ll take that under consideration.
The clearest painterly analogue is Bacon’s portrait of the Pope. Or parts of Eraserhead.
Thanks, Brian. Someone else also mentioned Francis Bacon in connection with The Club. And, yes, http://google.com/search?q=francis+bacon shows his concern with, uh, well, perhaps you could say it shows his concern with expressive painting through faces. Not simply portraiture or just ‘scary’ pics but painting that conveys things it would be very difficult to write or do via photography… His ‘Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ is not as mutated as many of his other pieces, but as an indictment of power, it’s very strong. The mouth. The hands.
I saw Eraserhead years ago, but I don’t recall it too much, though I recall something of the grotesqueness of the baby.
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