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Tolchinsky, Debra and Dave

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/1813/12953

Digital access to this material is pending artist's approval. Materials may be viewed onsite at the Goldsen Archive, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University.

By considering cultural phenomena including plastic surgery, Reality TV, and medical case studies, we confront dichotomies such as beauty/horror, psyche/body, natural/medically constructed, celebrity/obscurity, in a simultaneously playful, creepy, and ironic fashion. And while our projects range from raw speakers with tiny video screens hung on a gallery wall to synchronized multi-monitor elevator installations, our concerns consistently focus on the relationship between fame, humiliation, and the im/possibility of progress.

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    2006 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
    Tolchinsky, Debra and Dave (2009-06-11T14:58:01Z)
    On the web and in a retail store featuring a networked big screen LCD, an array displays 31 one-minute video clips of persons who have answered an ad asking, "Why do you believe you are a survivor?" The man who is attacked with an ax and locked in a freezer. The woman who must feed her four children on food stamps. The teenager whose cancer is in remission. From the sensational to the everyday to the profound, these one-minute clips confront the viewer with different definitions of surviving.
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    2008 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal
    Tolchinsky, Debra and Dave (2009-06-10T17:36:07Z)
    On the web and in a retail store featuring a networked big screen LCD, an array displays 31 one-minute video clips of persons who have answered an ad asking, "Why do you believe you are a survivor?" The man who is attacked with an ax and locked in a freezer. The woman who must feed her four children on food stamps. The teenager whose cancer is in remission. From the sensational to the everyday to the profound, these one-minute clips confront the viewer with different definitions of surviving. The look of the web site: Slick, as if it were advertising a real Reality TV show. The retail store, a "spin off" of the web site, located in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, near CBS (the producer of Survivor). On the outside of the storefront: SURVIVORS: UPLOADED AND RESURRECTED Inside, two salespeople (the artists who have moved from Chicago to Los Angeles to "work" at the store) invite the would-be "buyer" in to sit on a comfortable couch, watch the big screen LCD, and manipulate the attached computer keyboard. The participant views the clips and then votes which survivor must go because his/her trauma isn't up to snuff. (The one who receives the most votes that day will be jettisoned.) The salespeople then give the participant a souvenir, which consists of a picture of one of the survivors and a description of their survival story. The participant is invited to come back tomorrow and vote again or vote on the web (the URL is provided). At the end of day 1 after tallying the retail store and web votes: 30 survivors left. At the end of Day 2: 29 survivors. From 31 little screens on the array to 30 to 29 to 28... black boxes where the original survivors used to be.