Lossless Series
video series made in collaboration with rebecca baron
In Baron and Goodwin’s Lossless series the “materiality” of the digital becomes the source-code for experimental execution. The artists’ renditions of appropriated films are certainly not “lossless” (i.e. a copy of the original in which nothing is lost), but rather gainful: through various techniques of digital disruption–compression, file-sharing, the removal of essential digital information–the artists reveal the gain of a “new” media, full of material forms ripe for aesthetic sleuthing.
Braxton Soderman
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Lossless #1 is a 16mm film loop showing Dorothy’s shadowy, fluttering ruby slippers endlessly clicking. The image is derived using custom software comparing 35mm film frames against DVD compressed frames. -
Lossless #2: a three-minute video constructed from a bit torrent file of Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon in the process of being downloaded. -
Lossless #3: a video in which missing keyframes from a clip of John Ford’s The Searchers turns the American West into a melting ribbon of ochre and rust. -
Lossless #4: an animation showing the motion vectors that propel blocks of color between keyframes in Ernie Gehr’s structuralist piece Serene Velocity. -
Lossless #5 uses some of the same techniques, applied to a Busby Berkeley extravaganza.
