Video
[remotion] video (QuickTime .mov)
[remotion]
Software, computer, webcam
2002
[remotion] (2002) is a site‑specific, commissioned software installation that turns a webcam into a translator between the natural landscape and digital. By using simple computer‑vision algorithms, the system continuously detects and isolates the silhouettes of moving foliage. Those contours are reduced in real‑time to three small square points that “chalk” or “blip” the presence of living matter across both temporal and spatial axes.
Rather than use technology to monitor the very human world, this piece seeks to call into question the idea of mastery over our environment. The camera watches plants very carefully, and the software pixels trace the presence of living material in both to time and space. The visual output is always in flux, mirroring the relentless dynamism of the environment it observes. This deliberate reduction to a minimalist set of marks runs counter to the prevailing technological impulse to capture the world with the ever-increasing promise of “fidelity.” Instead, [remotion] foregrounds the act of translation itself. The project explores the relationship between nature and human culture through the gradual reduction of form, highlighting the ongoing tension between nature—a continuously self‑regenerating system—and technoculture, which habitually seeks to model, archive, reproduce, and consume that system.
Through its abstraction, [remotion] invites viewers to contemplate how much of the organic world is lost, transformed, or re‑imagined when mediated by the digital, and it asks what is revealed when the “camera‑eye” is forced to summarize the landscape in only three points.
[remotion] connects with the basic questions of computer-based art: the question of the relation of a work to the real world, the relation of the object to its image, the place and function of light and movement in time.
Exhibitions
- “CODeDOC,” exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art (reprogram and relaunch of 2002 work) November 2026
- CODE – The Language of Our Time, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, September 6-11 2003
- CODEDOC, Internet Artwork at Online at the Artport, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, 2002
Collections
- The Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport Collection, New York, New York, 2005