Anthony Discenza

I received a little brown package, all the way from California, with two of Anthony Discenza's works yesterday. Moving Image and Object 8242600.

Moving Image stills



Object 8242600 stills



A few words Anthony wrote about he's practice back in June 2003:

Between the relentless spread of consumerism and the rapid advancement of technology, we find ourselves exposed to ever-greater amounts of visual stimuli. From television, movies, and the internet, to an endless sea of magazines and other print media, a steady stream of highly mediated imagery assaults us. In the constant battle for viewer attention, more and more of our information, regardless of its content or context, arrives in the form of elaborately manipulated visual sequences formally and structurally indistinguishable from mass entertainment. The result is a profound level of alienation, a gradual poisoning of our own experience as the logic of the spectacle colonizes our own internal narratives.

As a visual artist complicit in the production and consumption of images, I find this situation both fascinating and deeply problematic. I'm particularly concerned with the violence which informs our media over-exposure. By this, I'm not necessarily referring to specific violent images or content, but rather to the dissociative effects produced by the speed, quantity, and extreme disparity of the imagery we consume. My work attempts to expose this violence while acknowledging its seductive, anaesthetizing force.

I work mainly with visual material appropriated from commercial film and television. Using re-recording, compression, and signal degradation to break down the original information, I look for ways to collapse media imagery into itself, to arrest it within a moment of simultaneous destruction and reification. Through this collapse, I'm trying to uncover layers of meaning not apparent in the original context. At the same time, I'm interested in revealing the world of images around us as a very "real" space--one which shapes our world view in all sorts of potent but invisible ways. Finally, my goal is to destabilize the act of viewing itself, in the hopes of revitalizing the ways we engage with this both ubiquitous and unseen world of images.

Anthony Discenza
June 2003

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at 4:15 PM