Of all the artists participating in this year’s International Teletext Art Festival, Emilie Gervais’s “Take Care of Your Pixels!” series is the most sly in how it works within the strict medium thematic.
The limitations of Teletext — six colours, a pixel grid canvas of 24 rows and 40 columns, and animation solely of the blink-effect kind — forces Gervais to isolate the tropes of found gendered information behaviors she typically layers into frantic, web 1.0 surf club confusion. (A good example of this is PΛЯΚΣD DӨMΛIП GIЯᄂƬӨMBƧƬӨПΣ, one of her current #internetghetto web-based projects.)
The cyan blue tears of the above seemingly distressed Lichtenstein woman then appears to be a transposed throwback to Gervais’s Blinking Girls collaboration with Sarah Weis. The tears flash alongside pound notes and a white courier font exclamation — “VAGINAS ?!!” — suggesting her tears are not for Brad or Jeff, but perhaps for her own vertical blanking lined agency. Despite the garish kitsch, there’s a vulnerability. It’s like surreptitiously sifting through Blingees in Memoriam, where users sparkle and glitter their loved ones in an effort to dispel the banalities of life: we live, after all, to die. But at least in the digital afterlife, we can all live on like unicorns. (Speaking of which: GIF makers, Blingee will pass into the great beyond on August 25.)
Gervais’s works, alongside others, is being broadcasted until September 13 in ARD Text, ORF TELETEXT and ORF III TELETEXT, Swiss Text and arte Teletext. It will also be part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2015 in Linz/Austria from September 3-7.
Comments on this entry are closed.