Jubal Brown, Total War | 2010 | 50min | DV | Canada
A new work by Toronto based video master of the mash-up, Jubal Brown, Total War lifts off at a symphonic scale, proffering a dystopian take on the lure and the lurid on view via mass media today. Brown alludes to several influences in his conceptualizing of this complexly structured piece. In particular, he cites Baudrillard’s hugely influential treatise on the violence of the image as crucial to his own dissection of contemporary capture culture and Hollywood cinema.
Indeed, some of that philosopher’s words return like an acid reflux of representations in Total War, a work whose main image bank is drawn from YouTube. Remembering Baudrillard’s take on the triumph of banality in contemporary society, “…. murder of the secret of the image, drowned by hyper-visibility, by unconditional transparency” (2004), we are haunted by Jubal Brown’s shaman-like ability to literally “wear” the skin of this murder in Total War.
As viewers, we exist in the same arena as those hunted via the computerized killing screens of soldiers bombing in Iraq or kicking down doors of frightened civilians in Afghanistan, or out for a night with the boys shooting rabbits or deer or boar – anything that will die – with the night scope on, or just killing time on the couch with a bunch of goofy, bored youth. It’s all the same really in Total War. That these images end up on YouTube is inevitable; but it’s the initial impetus to record that gnaws near the base of consciousness. (- Lisa Steele)
Jubal Brown, Party Tapes Series | Ongoing | Various | DV | Canada
Rhythmic audio/visual piece featuring various abstracted party scenes with dancing, socializing, disco lights, etc. A time fragmented spacial disorientation of 1980′s electro party girls processed and treated with a kinetic 3-D like flicker effect.
Image content is crowd scenes appropriated from movies or television or the internet, consistently of large ambiguous groups of people and their movement. This source material is treated with channel filters and cut with a flicker effect alternating rapidly between complimentary colors slightly offset by fractions of a second.
The main impetus of the series Party Tape is a dissection of the process off seeing space and the experience of perceiving time. Using flicker as a spacially and temporally transformative element to relocate the viewer in a displaced space and time ambitiously outside of the role of viewer and into that of participant, immersed in the environment and implicated in the occupation of space.
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JUBAL BROWN is a video maker, multi-media artist, organizer, and writer based in Toronto. He has shown extensively in Europe and North America. His projects consistently challenge boundaries of watchability, pushing limits of spectatorship, often manifesting an amoral barrage of mindless directionless energy, often as a tragic and beautiful collision of despair and longing. Past projects include The Cult of PO-PO, Toronto’s legendary WASTELAND event series, ART SYSTEM Cultural centre, FAMEFAME, UNKNOWN UNKNOWN, THE LAND OF THE LOST, and the audio/visual event series VIDEODROME.
