MBS Material

2017
Streaming Video

From the press release for Material:

MBS Material is a streaming video that continues the artist’s exploration of the visual systems of design and advertising. The work is presented in the gallery as a streaming video via a custom built website that exists, not unlike Netflix or Hulu, “in the cloud” only, opening up questions of immateriality, fixity, ownership, and network dependence.

In 2014, Google developed a design “language” known as Material Design that was open to the public via a set of online resources and tutorials. It encompasses a set of strict rules on how to design user interfaces in screen-based media, purportedly to ensure a uniform and seamless digital experience for the computer user as they move from one application to the next. The artist has taken a series of these tutorial videos and re-edited them in the tradition of a found footage video. Both liberating and critiquing its source material, the work’s precise editing foregrounds repetition and geometric movement, creating a formal link to early 20th-century experimental animation and Post-war Structuralist film-making.