96x96" - Archival Print on Vinyl, Metal Grommets - 2011
96x96" - Archival Print on Vinyl, Metal Grommets - 2011
96x96" - Archival Print on Vinyl, Metal Grommets - 2011
96x96" - Archival Print on Vinyl, Metal Grommets - 2011
16mm Film - Silent - 6 channels - total running time 23:35 - 2011
HD/SD Video - 2:43 - 2011
Cobain’s suicide marked the end of an
era in grunge music. In retrospect, this event came to signal the melding of
punk music with the commercial mainstream. During Cobain’s life he often vocalized his criticisms of the
corporate music industry. His disdain was aimed at major record labels,
commercial radio stations and MTV® — all corporate structures
that he was very much a part of.
However, once Cobain signed over the rights to his music to the David
Geffen Company in 1991 his control over his music began slipping away. His independent punk ideology had been supplanted
by major corporations’ profit models, and there was little he could do about it. My David
Geffen Videos alter and distort the complete series of Nirvana music videos
produced during the band’s final years, during the period of its Geffen
contract. I altered these original videos by using a practice called “data
bending,” which means the manipulation of a digital file’s source code (the
zeros and ones). When this code is
selectively altered, the video becomes severely damaged, and the results can be
almost unrecognizable. The new
data-bent imagery recalls hallucinatory images produced in the mental state
known as hypnogogia, characteristic of the state in between alertness and
sleep. When altering these videos
I deliberately evoked this state to parallel the limbo moments Cobain must have
experienced in the transitional space between life and death, when he had no
control of what was going on around him. The videos are silent in order to reference
the loss of Cobain’s independent voice during the period of the Geffen contract.
