Lincoln Schatz:
Random Access Portraits
For many artists, the act of creation is also an act of control: a deliberate reshaping of reality with a specific message in mind. But for Chicago-based video artist and sculptor Lincoln Schatz, the creative act is all about letting go.
Schatz creates “generative portraits” of people and places: video images captured by digital cameras, stored on hard drives, and randomly recombined over time in overlapping layers. The resulting works can be read in many ways — as abstractions, as narratives, or as borrowed memories of moments in time.
“I love the fact that these portraits continually evolve,” says Schatz. “I don’t control what gets kept, what gets discarded, what gets put onscreen. It’s completely random. To some people that’s disconcerting. To the people who really get it, I think it’s inspiring. I’m simply creating a framework, a hole though which things take place.”
The portraits combine elements of videography, sculpture, and programming. Schatz uses Pd GEM, a graphical programming environment for multimedia, to set up such parameters as image durations and the number of layers that are simultaneously displayed. Digital video is recorded at 30 fps and stored as QuickTime files on a Mac, then recalled in different configurations and displayed on flat-panel video screens.
Schatz’s work is in private collections from New York to Shanghai, and he’s exhibited at galleries and museums around the world, including the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and bitforms in Seoul, Korea. He has also done large-scale public installations — for example, a pair of 9’ x 9’ video walls entitled “From Here,” installed in early 2007 in the lobby of the One Arts Plaza complex in downtown Dallas.
Some of his pieces, like “Cluster,” which was displayed at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, capture images from a single point of view via a camera mounted in the frame of a plasma screen. As viewers look at the work, their images are captured as well. The constantly shifting video layers are displayed at random — they might show scenes from a moment ago, or a year ago. As more and more images are collected, the work recalls and displays an increasingly varied reflection of its own audience.
Video Cubed
Schatz’s current project, a series entitled Cube, brings even more detail and complexity to the idea of portraiture. The Cube is a 1,600-pound, ten-foot square steel-and-Plexiglas enclosure with two dozen cameras mounted in different positions on all sides, facing inward. Subjects spend an hour inside the Cube, surrounded by whatever objects they choose, doing whatever they feel represents them best. Video footage is recorded to a series of Mac minis, then recombined via Schatz’s custom software to create layers of images, which are ultimately displayed on large plasma screens.
“It’s interesting to see how people respond to this space,” Schatz observes. “In Chicago, we had an architect who brought in furniture that he designed. We’ve had two personal trainers with these amazing bodies, and a club owner who’s coming in with his turntables. There’s a painter who has created four canvases, one for each side of the Cube, with openings for the cameras — then he’ll paint on the canvases, so he’ll be composited into one of his own landscapes.”
The Cube exhibition is on display at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco from October 27 to November 24, 2007, and will also travel to Miami, New York, and other locations. In addition to the Cube enclosure itself, the exhibition features three 50-inch screens on which the portraits rotate. “Each portrait is up for a few minutes,” Schatz explains. “Then it goes black, and then moves on to the next person’s portrait.”
For the San Francisco show, Schatz chose subjects who have made significant cultural contributions to the Bay Area, including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark; Tiffany Shlain, co-founder of the Webby Awards; performance artist Annie Sprinkle; Dr. Haile Debas, Executive Director of UCSF Global Health Sciences; and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.
“It’s been fascinating working with these different people,” Schatz says. “Traditionally, you think of portraiture as a static moment. But with the Cube, you’re acting out your identity over time. And people are taking this thing and running with it! They’re affirming that they can create something new out of it.”
