ETHAN HARNISCH

A  SERIES  OF  IMAGES in no discerned order artist's statement: (reflection contains artists statement content, do not be restricted)  Here is a series of images, presented as a series of images. Some are videos, but these are also just series of images with 'closer' relations to each other image. Throughout the term they were made with a ranging degree of care and specification. Content sources range from a kid's digital camera (worst quality possible), movies, musical performances, broken cassette player, taxidermy demonstrations, and synthesizers. Image sources are blend of digital cameras, photos of screens of separate content, and internet sources (details at each file).  Each image or file was created throughout the term and with consistent association and connotation of reading Baudrillard (or the experience of reading Baudrillard). Each video follows a common construction template by pure association to the other through their production--They are a series of im

Las Vegas is still a desert. Everyone began to make signs larger and larger in grand tackiness and eventually they began to design their signs and flashing lightbulb-laden trim before their own businesses or even a concept of advertisement. It is pure image of signage over and over in endless strips of synthetic material and environment. Las Vegas is still a desert as the signs do not point to anything but themselves. Las Vegas is a conglomerate commodity and product, stuffed with an architecture which makes itself around the goal of attraction solely. As capitalism goes on long enough to see its production use start to dwindle, signs can replace the products and the value can continue to be artificially created upon itself, losing reality far behind it. Las Vegas in every single sense but the people is this: a dizzying maze of signs and everything eye-catching by the lowest threshold, built on a desert and sustained as a superfluous city of experience. 'The big sign and the little

 To think about concrete in a completely utilitarian sense seems to allow it to dissolve into the backdrop of reality of its own creating. Concrete and stucco [more-so] are a symbol of industrial conquest, a material which when solidified is intended to become part of the landscape its in (or creates). You do not think of concrete objects which aren't bolted to the foundation, or stand as unmovable/unremovable. Concrete is our own version of God's clay and we've even started to imitate it on top of that!  We have dug up the earth and liquified it by our own accord and poured it back over the earth like stucco on a McMansion. Speaking of McMansions, I love driving through the neighborhoods that are lined up like display products on a shelf (which they are), with forms frankensteined from so many high-class associated design elements, stuck together and broken so they can fit, completely ignoring the design elements' intended function (columns that support nothing, windo

Unisex Love Nest (1999), a parent's static idea of their child's gender - polarized, cutified, idealized, simulated and projected. "I’m an avant-gardist. We’re living in the postmodern age, the death of the avant-garde. So, all I can really do now is work with this dominant culture and flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it, expose it— because popular culture is really invisible." --Mike Kelley Mike Kelley (b. Detroit 1954 - d. Los Angeles 2012) was a conceptual artist (not sure how he'd feel about that label, though) whose application of the punk attitude 'by all means necessary' to his artistic practice makes his work hard to categorize within strictly material terms.  Banana Man  1983 (early performance piece, replicating famous kids tv show character off of hearsay descriptions) Kelley's childhood was that of a true punk attitude, defying his parent's projected aspirations and all else of society and culture he found as 'a load of shit'.

 The code of the state of policing by national law and the nuclear arm's race is a deterrence tactic by preceding every possible real event with a simulated functional double that puts all control of its appearance (for that is all that matters for it) within the state. Laws as punishment function in a similar way, providing a simulated consequence for an action that neither is wholly true consequence (it is made up), nor completely false (for the law is still is enacted). This puts it in a sort of hyperreality. On a total scale of deterrence, the nuclear arms race puts every power that acquires some in a immediate state of deterrence. In all powers holding nuclear arms, they ensure their mutual destruction if used (totality reached) so this would not happen even by the manufacturer's predictions. In addition, holding these weapons causes that all forms of conflict become simulated conflicts enacted upon simulated old situations and stakes in a attempt to deter and control any

In blurring the line between view and viewer, active and passive, and real and model, reality tv is a format with consequences unique to it (apart from/similar to maybe televised news, etc.), in that it throws us and the television into a slightly indiscernible realm of hyperreality.  Reality television is no longer the new thing it was for Baudrillard, so its particular phenomena state is common-place for us, though not in Baudrillard's way of putting things. We understand its fictitious nature and ability to manipulate both audience and cast (mistreatment, misleading production direction, etc.), as well as its layer of labeled-reality. "They lived as if we weren't there" was the trump-card of the Loud family experiment's creator and is an obvious naivety and arrogance to the reality of its production and product. Automatically, by putting cameras in their home, their own behavior will change. In their own personal experience of being filmed, their reality of beh

 Here's where my project is at: compilation format - montage of TV news animations/audio and set images, mixed with a bit more media such as stock footage clips and audio either derived from the sources or recreated altogether (both maybe). It needs to mutate and fold over itself and end in a eventual slowdown into stationary hyperdeath (whatever that means, I just made it up).  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stock footage is commodified video clips sold for the most banal uses but is sewn into the fabric of entertainment and advertising so well that it does not matter how stock footage it looks because it is a tool for association rather than making a film itself (it is pure filmmaking, with intention broken into predictive tags relating to the association it could apply to). Stock footage is film in its purest form under a late-stage capitalist society which is at least partially-aware