Daylight / Twilight
2010
HD video diptych
1 hr. 58 min. / 2 hr. 02 min.

The films Daylight (1996) and Twilight (2008) rearranged frame by frame based on each frame’s brightness value.  Daylight runs brightest to darkest while Twilight runs darkest to brightest.

Embedded videos above are a sample of the first two minutes of each film.

Installation shots below from Line Item in a Table of Opposites:

Scripting by Keith McKnight

AVATAR IN 3D
2010
HD video
2h34m

The entirety of James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar mapped onto the surface of a slowly rotating sphere.

Created in response to the popularity and availability of a pirated copy of Avatar on bittorrent.  Re-released on the video’s platform of origin–download the full piece here: http://torrentz.com/06ba6eb51dbdbe0b2acac4245ef2a3abf315e626.

//Direct link to torrent file if trackers remove it//

Note: above version has been accelerated to display the entirety of the piece in under 5 minutes.  The available torrent plays back in real time.

Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset
2009
HD Video
39 min

Video of a full sunset altered so that the brightness level remains constant from beginning to end.

This is how the piece looks in progression over time:

View higher-res jpeg

Man’s Head Convincingly Explodes (Topos)
2009
Styrofoam
24 x 48 x 50 in.

Displays the topography of a brief video clip. Each piece of styrofoam represents a histogram curve derived from successive video stills.

Detail:

OK
2009
Digital print
65 x 42 in.

Detail:

You Can Reply to This Message (series)
2008-2009
Performance; Digital Video, 720p HD
Above: Second video in series, 23 min.

Participants were placed in a room with access to text message-enabled cell phones and are dictated instructions written by external actors according to a time-based algorithm decontextualized from a major social event: the 2008 election projections of four different media outlets. Each numerical value relates to a different simple task or provocation—written by an anonymous group contracted through a crowdsourcing infrastructure and supplanted with instructions from Darren Wershler’s Tapeworm—which participants enact until they are fed a new task (in relational real time, as the projected returns change).

A performance piece designed to compose an organic network between a group of individuals acting within structures imposed by a group of physically dissociated actors. An exploration in the remote control of individuals through the orchestration of rule systems.

[First video in series, 47 min.]
[List of instructions for first video]

Sixteen-point Panorama
2009
Digital print
7′ x 15′

Studies in the Beijing urban landscape and hyperreal photographic representation using commercial software.  Created thanks to the Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Abroad Photography Seminar to Beijing, People’s Republic of China, University of Pennsylvania 2009.

Ten-point Panorama
2009
Digital print
30″ x 90″

Four-point Panorama
2009
Digital print
28″ x 50″

(detail)