Tony Oursler
[2] At CalArts, his fellow students included Mike Kelley, Sue Williams, Stephen Prina, and Jim Shaw.
Billy Rubin describes EVOL as "(charting) the territory between our passion-charged personal narratives and the near impossibility of representing that desire visually or linguistically, the end result often being nothing more than banal cultural cliches.
"[5] These works involve elaborate soundtracks, painted sets, stop-action animation, and optical special effects created by the artist.
[6] Oursler's early installation works are immersive dark-room environments with video, sound, and language mixed with colorful constructed sculptural elements.
In these projects, Oursler experimented with methods of removing the moving image from the video monitor using reflections in water, mirrors, glass, and other devices.
[7] The large-scale installation L7-L5 deals with science fiction as entertainment in contradiction to the terror of first-hand accounts of alien encounters.
In his text "Time Stream", Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peepholes.
[11] Oursler's interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image led to large-scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.
[13] This installation marks the artist's first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead.
Aurora sightings and surrounding mountains evoke the lawless and anarchic past of American culture: abandoned goldmines and violent desperadoes of the Wild West.
Narratives unique to the mysterious desert are reflected in the spoken texts of the installation, and the resulting collage of scripts performed by Arizona locals and immigrants is an attempt to let the colorful sedimentary history speak for itself.
[17] The installation took the form of three parts: Klang, a large-scale video cave, Spectral Power, an iconic talking lamppost, and Cognitive / Dissonance, two complementary tree projections.
[18] In 2014, Oursler simultaneously presented two large-scale installations in the Netherlands: X ergo Y at the Stedelijk Museum and I/O underflow at the Oude Kerk.
[20] Tear of the Cloud, commissioned by Public Art Fund and curated by Daniel S. Palmer, was presented at Riverside Park along the banks of the Hudson River in the summer of 2018.
The structure of the Internet, which blurs the boundary between culture and technology, is evident in the production of millions of bricks in Haverstraw, New York, and the long-distance communication of the talking drum as a precursor to the invention of Morse code.
'The Headless Horseman and his horse are important references in Tear of the Cloud, as they gallop towards artificial intelligence, the chess-playing computer Deep Blue's famous knight sacrifice, facial recognition technologies, and bots which have provoked significant questions about our future', according to Oursler.
Mining progressive social movements, the work touches on the mid-19th century Oneida community, their attempts at free love and highly successful manufacturing of silverware and animal traps; the Seneca Falls Convention; counterculture musical and psychedelic experimentation at Woodstock; and the remixing of nascent hip-hop culture in the South Bronx.
The river is also characterized by darker connotations including pesticides, PCBs, Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, and Sybil’s Cave, where the infamous Mary Rogers murder occurred.
Oursler will bring these images – and more – to life, through the meticulously produced digital projections that evoke the scenarios with kaleidoscopic wonder", according to Lehmann Maupin.
[26] While at California Institute of the Arts, Oursler founded the musical and performance group "Poetics" alongside fellow student Mike Kelley.
Oursler met Kim Gordon in the late 1970s and collaborated with her on Making the Nature Scene, a short film examining New York club culture in the 1980s.
In 2000, Ourlser's installation The Darkest Color Infinitely Amplified was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Modern.
Writer Dan Halpern went with him to New Zealand, where he was finishing a massive projection-based installation piece on the private sculpture park of billionaire Alan Gibbs.
