Soft Rains (2002) film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: Soft Rains

Narrative, archiving, the database: these are the significant terms underlying much new media theory and practice, and they form the triangular foundation for many of the projects made by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy since their creative collaboration began seven years ago. The New York-based artists maintain an interest in hard-core film theory, the history of avant-garde filmmaking, conceptual art, and electronic media (both old and "new"), and they cite influences as varied as Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, with whom they share a skepticism regarding visual culture's naïve celebration of new technology, and Pauline Oliveros, whose innovative artmaking strategies offer a model for their own practice.

The pair studied film theory as undergraduates before earning their MFA degrees in electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since 1995, they've limned the most pertinent boundaries of contemporary new media with projects that reflect on forms of storytelling, archiving, and the limitless database conjured by the Internet in a body of work that's quite cognizant of the creative endeavors of video, performance, conceptual, and installation artists from the 1960s onward. They're not fettered by any single disciplinary boundary, but instead easily move from web-based art to single-channel videos, interactive computer installations, CD-ROMs, and now with their latest project, robotic-controlled miniature filmmaking installations. In short, they're eclectic, but each of their disparate artworks continues a central focus, namely the interrogation of the intersections of media, visual culture, and the ways in which we make sense of the world.

With Small Appliances (1996), for example, the McCoys created an interactive computer installation based on a collection of stories told by women about their relationship to technology. In Airworld (1999) they looked at the comfortable transfer of textual forms from one Internet-related capitalist enterprise to another. And in Every Anvil (2001), another interactive installation, the pair created a piece in which viewers are able to sift through dozens of video clips culled from Warner Brothers cartoons that are grouped by visual motifs -- for instance, every anvil -- rather than by narrative. Recently similar techniques were used for works in We Like to Watch, the pair's 2002 exhibition at the gallery Postmasters in New York.

In addition to playing with technology and visual culture, these pieces highlight ways of thinking about narrative in terms of modular structures. "We are interested in the role that narrative plays as a primary means of organizing people's lives and experiences," explains Kevin. They point out that genres for film and TV have become so engrained that viewers now take control of the forms themselves, creating their own versions of stories given to them in film, TV, and advertising. Much of this narrative revision takes place in the form of fan culture where individuals develop personal strategies for navigating cultural forms. "Fans create their own mental geography or roadmap -- it's like a cognitive network that the fan projects onto the material that they have," he says, fascinated by this sort of appropriation and revision.

For their latest project Soft Rains, the pair continues their exploration of narrative by automating the process by which it's formed. The project will combine miniature movie sets, surveillance cameras, and switching systems, allowing viewers to observe a film and its production in their entirety. They liken the project to a visit to Universal Studios, the theme park that helped launch America's fascination with the meta-narratives of the filmmaking process. However, while Universal Studios elevates film production to heroic proportions, the McCoys will shrink the enterprise. Each mini-film will also be based on a particular genre, but again, the McCoys will pare it down. "How many things can you remove and still have a story?" asks Jennifer. "Can you take out the dialogue? Can you take out the car chase?" The resulting little movies and sets will highlight our culture's fascination with the storytelling process while at the same time debunking the aura of the artwork. More important however, Soft Rains shows just how little we need as viewers to weave our own stories.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | Americana | The Human Animal | Science & Technology | New York | 2002