Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

I currently completed a piece that I have mentioned briefly before, that involved pulling cartoons from my personal childhood form my memory and subjecting myself to them as an adult. While engaging in this act and eating a bowl of Trix cereal (Trix are for Kids) I was trying to reference the moments of bliss experienced as a child when engaged in such activities. Some of the context of these cartoons were darker and though they probably taught me life lessons in ways that I have not completely deciphered yet, I feel the response I got for the work is a result of my in ability to talk about the piece, or have give the piece the time and research it deserved. Though excited about the completion on the piece, I am now excited to revisit it in some new way socially and politically to bring something to the viewer. Looking at the work of Every Anvil (2001) by artist couple Jennifer and Kevin McCoy I feel there approach to commentary on cartoons is a good example of directions that such research could move toward for me.

Every Anvil (2001) is a video database of shots from over one hundred episodes of Looney Toons cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s. Each shot is indexed according to categories of violence and physical extremism such as ‘Every Explosion,’ ‘Every Flattened Character,’ and ‘Every Scream.’ The McCoys devised an interactive installation in which visitors (or participants) choose which disks to play according to the ‘action’ or ‘emotion’ they want to see.

Similarly, Every Shot, Every Episode (2001) contains literally that: every shot of every episode of the 1970s television show, Starsky and Hutch, which viewers can watch according to their own tastes for the content of certain scenes. The computer now rearranges the dramatic content for prime emotional impact according to the desires of the viewer.

An interesting aspect of the McCoy’s work is that they write their own programs -- and along the way arguably turn the tedious task of writing code into an art form.

"There isn't a shortage of visual and sonic effects offered in commercial programs. But when we want to combine different processes to achieve a certain aesthetic or per formative effect, we often can't," said Jennifer McCoy. "If we make a software tool ourselves, we can customize it easily. Plus we instantly know how to use it, of course."

I am not necessarily interest in the programming aspect of their work, however their work is a lesson in content and what it is you want to say to your viewer or participant about that content and what is the best rout for the content to be experienced. This is not to say that I couldn’t see myself learning programming in the coming years to integrate into my work, but right now I am very excited about the idea of editing imagery in simple ways to convey messages, whether that be programs as simple as photoshop, or by editing clips in Final Cut.

Jana, Reena. "Real Artists Paint by Numbers." WIRED. 6 Sept. 2001. Web.

Rush, Michael. Video Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.