Visage - a video piece created by Sam Kennedy

Program Note: When my roommate, Sam Kennedy, needed to create a brief animation for his first year seminar course about Art as a form of experimentation, he felt that the subject matter of his work would benefit from the sonic possibilities of digital audio that we had talked about casually in the time before he created this work. In Visage, Kennedy aims to examine and criticize manifestations of self image fed by superficial online communities like Instagram. The viewer is invited both literally and figuratively to inhabit the self-reflective eye of Kennedy’s self portrait, rendered with coarse neon curves (a stark juxtaposition to the nuanced gradients of his prior works in this series) that make up a rotoscope. This manifestation of self image stares into the imaginary camera as it is gradually obliterated by digital artifacts. To supplement Kennedy’s visuals, I datamoshed frames from his animation and processed them with a combination of intensely digital distortions – Lese’s Codec and AirWindows Ulaw Encode – to create an unnatural and painful soundscape that I felt supplemented the discomfort Sam’s animation achieves.