Week 5: Science and Progress - Tony Oursler

American Tony Oursler's video based works are a refreshing, interesting and unique take on visual communication. Oursler manages to turn lifeless, usual and inanimate shapes and objects into lively, sometimes shockingly alive human figures. The TV culture that took hold on most of the developed world over the course of his early life (and hasn't let up to this day) serves as one of his main sources of inspiration for his multimedia works. Using shapes, household objects and other 3D surfaces, Oursler projects moving images onto these surfaces to bring them to life. These formerly anonymous and inanimate objects suddenly burst with personality and draws the viewers attention right in.

The use of video, a very new but widely used medium, in this way is a unique angle on a common way to communicate ideas. Oursler's work shares some views with the era of enlightenment, a period where the population began to move away from the conservative views of the church and its traditions, and started to explore the world through their own eyes to make their own judgements and conclusions on what surrounds them. People dipped into the sciences, using reason, math and logic to come to conclusions on questions they had. It was the era of the individual - a time where a person was free to act on their own accord and make their own decisions on any questions that may confront them. Oursler takes a common form of communication in video, and looks it at from his own angle rather than the tradition applications, using it to bring sculptures to life rather than project moving images onto a flat screen. It's not just in the use of his medium, but also his subject matter. He often uses imagery, speech and storylines that may be considered as "crude", especially in his older works. Formely taboo subjects like sex are explicitly explored, dissected and reformed in visual stories in his work. He looks at the emotional values of the topic, the morals and the scientific viewpoints all from angles new to the viewer, almost child like. It is this unique and free viewpoint that sets Oursler apart from most other artists.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Oursler
http://csw.art.pl/new/99/ousler_e.html
http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/illuminations/image5.htm
http://www.bookrags.com/news/step-into-the-art-stars-studio-tony-moc/