Brody Condon

Published in Beautiful/Decay Magazine

 

 

Brody Condon’s digital modifications and media interventions radically recontextualize contemporary entertainment technology. Condon infuses pre-existing iconographic subcultural constellations- such as video game systems or historical re-enactment communities- with multitudinous interests, ranging from conceptual performance art of the 60’s, medieval themes, or autobiographical traumatic memories. Condon’s projections simultaneously evoke an uncanny familiarity and vertiginous nescience- traversing a fine line between the projected and the dreamed, virtual and real-world realms, man-made and machine generated. Though his work is at the brink of cutting edge innovation, it is fundamentally situated within the classic Western humanist tradition of exploring mimesis through virtuosic displays of verisimilitude.

Why do you feel that the media and iconography you use (typically video game thematics) is an apt tool for contemporary social critique?

Screen based entertainment is what most people here actually consume. Using such a conceptually loaded and technologically complex material like game engines for projects was initially hard enough, but combining it with images from my lived experience or problematic historical moments turned it into a useful tool for cultural criticism. I offered this widely used pop cultural medium some autobiographical and socio-political specificity.

How did you come to work in this fashion?

In the mid to late 90’s I had been for the last few years doing repetitive motion performances in sculptural installations that were abstractions of spaces from traumatic memories, and eventually I replaced my body with the game character body on the screen. Then I began mixing sculptural and performative art strategies I was using from the 60’s and 70’s with the materials and visual styles that intuitively knew from prolonged exposure – computer and role playing games.

In the pieces “KarmaPhysics< Elvis” (2004) and “KarmaPhysics <Ram Dass,” (2004) you modified the first person shooter game, “Unreal 2003,” which utilizes a real-time physics engine to simulate the manifold physical dynamics of game character death. However, your projections replaced the typically violent animations with sequined, sporadically dancing/convulsing Liberace-esque Elvises and a bizarre conjoined, karmic conglomeration of multiple Ram Dasses, the 60’s psychedelic spiritual teacher.. Obviously your substitutions embody rather benign and comedic abstractions– can you explain the evolution of the pieces, and your reasoning behind these choices?

At that time I was tracing the geneology of  “new age” religious ideas. Ram Dass’s book “Be Here Now” was the first book I remember seeing as a kid, usually during joint infused talks with my mother where we discussed the planes of existence. Elvis, well… He is a figure of excess, a pop cultural figure worshipped like a spiritual leader. In the case of the Elvis piece, I created that movement, something in between dancing and dying, before I decided on the character body. I don’t make any distinction between material that I find, buy, or make myself, so I took the Elvii bodies from some game-modification site online where kids post their home-made characters. It was the obvious choice after seeing the movement.

I found it interesting that systems, such as Unreal 2003, which employ physics engines designed to predict effects according to Newtonian laws– are typically only used by cutting edge scientists or video game animators. For example, these physics engines can be used for real world purposes, such as modeling fluid dynamics in order to test air and watercraft, or for virtual realities, to create more realistic, life-like fantasies.

Yeah of course, a great example of this is the gorgeous work of Professor Ron Fedkiw, who creates procedural algorithms that visualize physical dynamics, which are used as much for Hollywood special FX as they are for industry and science applications. This was also true in the Rennaisance, new technologies used to render the illusion of 3d space as seen by the eye, like optics and perspective, were also used outside of the visual arts.

My interest lies more in the history of representations of the figure and physical trauma - how we project ourselves into portraiture now - and it’s no longer a question of how to represent the exterior manifestation of death, i.e.dripping blood, but the physical dynamics of death.

What do you believe to be the confluences and departures of the highly linked, yet distinct realities of the “virtual” and “real-world” realms? How do you think your practice as an artist straddles, polarizes, or responds to them?

I’m interested in the residue left over from various states of “projection of self” via drugs, religious experience, role playing, screens, whatever. Finding the places where these other fabricated spaces created by the over-identification with fantasy leak into our lived experience. Maybe the “…real affects produced by something that which does not yet exist”, mentioned by Zizek, I don’t know.

In your piece, “Untitled War,” you invited fighters from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a group that seeks to live and fight according to the technology and values of the middle ages- to conduct a battle fused with the phenomenon of a first person shooter competition. The entire performative event was recorded and streamed at the Echo Park Film Center, evocative of an online gaming competition. What do you think was gleaned from traversing and conflating the typically stratified fields of fantasy and realism, video game ideology and antiquated, medieval role-playing?

At some point in my miserable life I participated in the SCA. The worlds of computer games and open ended Medieval re-enactment like the SCA are tied closely together in a specific American subcultural constellation that combines fantasy table top as well as live role playing, computer game (many of them work with computers, many battles are inspired by computer games), and historical re-enactment communities. I try to re-contextualize them within the petri-dish of the gallery or cultural institutions to assist in the process of understanding the cultural implications of these “found performances”, then I modify these offline communities in much the same way that I modify the computer games.

I thought your war protest/peace and love digital intervention website “Velvet-Strike,” which includes recipes to peacefully subvert Counter-Strike, the tactical online terrorist/counter terrorist violent shooter game was at once hilarious. cleverly transgressive and radically political. Can you comment on the impetus behind this site, and how you conceptualize its function and affect?

At the beginning of the occupation of Afghanistan by American forces I was invited to collaborate on “Velvet-Strike” by the artist Anne-Marie Schleiner. She wanted to work on a project with the Spanish artist Joane Leandre on a project focused on computer games with military themes as internalized propaganda. An obvious idea, especially now, but at that early period  the idea had not been so clearly articulated to point directly at specific popular counter-terrorism games like Counter-Strike and also include the gaming community in such a direct way. It also predicted the new development of games simulating not historical, but current, conflicts.

Growing up with guardians swallowed by the bitter drug addicted aftermath of a semi-failed ideological revolution of  the late 60’s and 70’s, did not give me much faith in the project. I also was more of  a “gamer” at that time, and understood clearly the reaction from the community would be less than supportive, and possibly anti-productive. Like my other pieces around that time that involved online interventions into massively multiplayer role playing game spaces, I imagined my role to be the creation of absurd repetitive performances in new forms of public social space. As it turned out, after the piece moved through the player community via sites like Wired news, it was satisfying to watch the direct cultural impact, on a fairly widespread (though basic) level, of this simple intervention.

I thought your recent works “Resurrection (after Bouts,)” (2007) and “defaultproperties; (after Gerard David)” (2006) were fascinating as they fused the attempted hyperrealism of Northern Medieval/Renaissance painters with the verisimilitude of contemporary technology. What drew you to reference these particular artists, and to draw the apt parallel between these two visual strategies?

The first work of the Flemish Primitives I saw was Memling’s “Judgment” work from 1467-71. It was incredible, naked zombies crawling out of the ground and being weighed by a man in golden armor with peocock wings, then going to the glowing nudist camp on the left or into a volcano and eaten by cannibals on the right, all the while being watched by a bunch of dirty hippies with beards riding a rainbow out a golden extra-dimensional portal at the top. At the same time, the viewpoint of those works are meant to place the viewer inside the painting, and they depict these amazing moments of trauma and transcendence in stasis. They were like games waiting for the player to pick up the controller. They utilized the new technology of perspective, oil paint, and lighting techniques pictorially instead of literally like the south, for example using new shading techniques to enhance the plausibility of their fantasies, like light shining from the holy figure instead of a natural lighting source. I wanted to work with the paintings for a few years, but I did not begin them until I had lived in Holland for a couple years, and learned more about the socio-cultural landscape within which they were created. It then became clear, the connections between the development of radical Protestantism in the late medieval Northern Europe, and its relationship with contemporary American politics and culture. 

Overarchingly, are there any particular connotations or experiences you’d like to create or instill in your viewers?

It’s on a piece by piece basis, really. If there has been a loose theme running throughout the work since the beginning, I would say it has something to with understanding the aftermath of trauma..