Michael Chernoff is a Video Artist, Educator, and Media Production Researcher. Working at the intersection of surveillance, archive, and glitch media, his practice consists of connecting digital and analog video technologies in order to know ways in which people interact, observe and be observed through screens. Using various screen interfaces, cameras, and media players his video art takes on the form of intermedia assemblages and signal processes which turn into projects for filmmaking, installation, real-time performance, archive, and written research. His practice-based research he calls Video Archaeology examines social and cultural implementation of video while designing new applications for video as a medium for sustainability. Instead of thinking about video as clip or file Michael’s video artwork perceives video as a signal for hosting other signals. That video is a site of convergence for media, locations, time, users, machines, and activity within and around all screens. As an arts educator he promotes knowing the influence that materials and tools have on creativity; how technology affects knowledge, culture, identity, perception, and systems.
Artist Statement
Media in my opinion is any matter which instructs a form of expression. What should be said, can be said, and what will be said all differ due to the unique coding, logic, and context for both individuals and mechanical entities. Media enforms the mediums which infrom an observer. While my artwork is primarily about experimental electronic imagry and intermedia assemblage and processing the results of my practice-led research synthesizea complex issues related to cyberdom, surveillance, categorization, glitch media, compression, memory, and interacting with archive.
As socities become more reliant on computation so have we come to expand the inclusion of video applications. New worldviews are being synthezied from mass amounts of extracted data. What I consider to be the Videospehere is a network of screens, detectors, machines and users which is causing time, space, interaction and histories to collapse into and around the video screen. This complex of real and virtual recordings will synthesize a new realities few of us can imagine, let alone access. Not a conceptual reality but one made up by so called perfect things, techniques, and beings.
With these ideas in mind as a video artist and media production researcher I question how exactly can people resist or should react to such high levels of surveillance and simulation? I believe that when methods for using media are combined with social contexts we can consider media less as product and more as process. Societies should not be as fixated on authoring media but should emprace unfixed processes of modification, temporality, and fragmentation. We should recognize technology as being less a technical object. What gives meaning to a technology is better known through its usage by people over its manufactured design. It is no longer useful ask what started cyclical relationships of tools and users but instead examine the tension of knowledge. And with so much data extracted and modeled we must still try to communicate through new forms of media by understanding the old forms of media.
Background
Michael Chernoff has been an artist and media technician for over ten years. He received his BFA from Alfred University (2011) with an interdisciplinary blend of image making with photography, drawing, painting, print, and video. After working in corporate media and independent film production he chose to pursue media production as a social science and use media art making as a research method.
Research Topics: New Materialism, Determinism, Cybernetics, Glitch & Compression, Memory, Ontologies, Genealogies of Technology
MFA in Media Art Production from the Dept of Media Study in the College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo 2023
BFA in Fine Arts & Art Education from the College of Arts & Ceramics, Alfred University 2011
Media Artist + Researcher
︎Sustainability Thru Signal Processing︎2022
Always On
The Vidiot
TeleComputer
2021
NYC ATM ML
Pursuing Earth
THE LIBERTARIAN
Wiley Weatherman
ReWind Compressor
Discarding Earth
Being A Passenger
2020
Can(t) See Me Now!
THE APP
2019
PATS
2018
Ice Cream Drone
2015
Vanilla ISIS
2017
Invisible Foci
2014
Digital Synthesis Illustration
2013
Roody’s Room
Synthesis Ilustration
2011
Verse
Master (Series)
Video Being
2010
Dance Aches
Bangalor
Artist Bio
CV
︎ macherno@buffalo.edu︎intermedianary
©2022 Michael Chernoff