Jason Corace, Night Beyond Night, 2008
Unhappy with the fact that those who haven’t installed Add-Art, (a Firefox add-on that replaces ads with art) would not get to experience the animated gifs in The Future of Online Advertising (a show I curated for the extension that launched last week), I asked participating artist Jason Corace to create one specifically for my masthead. To quote my own curatorial statement, Corace “uses the Modern Library’s ten greatest English Language Novels list as the basis of [this] work. Compressing the text from each book and animating those images together in a 1 second loop, the result resembles a typographic permutation of television snow. While beautiful, the piece doesn’t change the functionality of space; the context and format of ads almost inevitably reduces…to visual noise.” Corace’s gifs literalize that reality, the most important knowledge in the world almost unavoidably incomprehensible in that format.
More recognizable in form, the image pictured above comes from the artist’s project Night Beyond Night, a program that pulls obituaries from the web, and renders the faces of the newly dead with text from the obituary. Notably, the words do not create a complete portrait, but rather an impermanent and ghostly image. Alan Duncan, an artist from Sacramento who died of heart disease, is currently being rendered.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Jason Corace is a media artist and educator living in NYC. He works in a collaborative studio called DoubleTriple, teaches New Media at the Parsons School of Design and has a background in data visualization, music and game design.
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