DANIAL NORD
STATEMENT

In the new body of work created for this exhibition, entitled “WELCOME HOME”, I used the domestic architecture of HAUS to explore media influence and cultural pollution in the contemporary home.

I am interested in the confusion and anxiety generated by streams of marketing and media messages that pour into our private lives through the wire. Politics, news, entertainment, religion, and commerce have become inexplicably intertwined. How does this domestic assault affect us as individuals and as a culture? Has media replaced our genuine emotions and motivations with scripted jargon and images? How does this phenomenon perpetuate itself and drive our economy? Where are we headed?

These are questions that I have asked myself during more than a decade of commercial media work, political activism, and artistic exploration.

In the three installations created for the living room, dining room, and hallway at HAUS, I have remixed audiovisual fragments gleaned from film, television and the internet. By reconfiguring familiar content in provocative sequences, I hope to jar the viewer into an analytical mode. To me, the results are funny, vile, frightening, idiosyncratic, overwhelming, and oddly attractive.

The flickering and fragmented imagery emitted from the fireplace in the living room romances the notion of TV as “the modern hearth.” In the dining room, text selected from hundreds of actual SPAM emails (which I personally received) is whispered by synthetic voices generated from multiple computers, disturbing listeners like intimate, electronic, prank phone calls. An additional aspect of this piece is the derivation of the term “SPAM” from Hormel Food's trademarked meat product, and their response to this slang usage. The private rooms in the hallway dramatize the impact of Hollywood films on our personal relationships – reducing cinematic domestic arguments to pulsating light and sound behind closed doors, setting up a voyeuristic situation in which viewers are not sure what is authentic emotion and what is artifice.

My influences are eclectic, from Dadaist poetry to Fluxus to "culture jamming" to contemporary commercial media. Populist source material collaged into various formats continues to inform my practice. I use montage as a way to juxtapose unaltered elements, creating new streams of dialectical questions. I am interested in pushing readymade media out of the box into a poetic environmental experience.

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