His cigarette smoke-stacks almost scared me out of my occasional habit, but as the wise Brandy once said, "almost doesn't count".
Projection of a woman eating/licking an ice-cream bar. Halfway through, the video reversed and she regurgitated the ice-cream to build the bar back up. It was very erotic, and also reminded me of a mother bird feeding her baby.
A canvas of a pretty, old-fashioned floral print, with a small video screen showing a person placing and organizing various everyday ''prized" posessions (keys, a compact disc, cigarettes, white-out, a box of Prilosec) and some junky gems glued hastily down one side. The play between old-fashioned standards of beauty and modern obsessions/cheap gilt was funny.
The standout piece (in my opinion) was a 5-foot Nokia phone. The dialer repeatedly punches in random numbers as the screen displays soft-core YouTube amateur porn videos that don't quite connect; this loops infinitely. It is a cheeky little jab at the content-craved cell-phone generation. YouTube is the new porn, people keep connecting and watching something that ultimately offers little satisfaction.
Oursler is actually quite obsessed with the way cell-phones have altered the human psyche. In a conversation with Dan Graham from his self-titled art book, he waxes on the way cell-phones have eaten up our ability to communicate effectively, as texting has become the de-rigeur mode of speaking, and as we all know, text messages are the most impersonal, confusing and misconstrued way of communicating with someone. Camera phones have taken this new strangeness even further by allowing anyone to take a picture of you at any time, send it to anyone in the world without your knowledge, and this creates this new possibility of discrediting a person via some invisible space and time.
I think cell phones are a sort of repulsive necessity today. I find myself spending futile time ''designing'' my texts to ensure I am getting my intonation across, which is rarely successful. Sometimes it makes me want to scream. What did people do before cell-phones?
