EL Putnam: PseudoRandom
2023 | EL Putnam: PseudoRandom explores aesthetic encounters through digital performance by implicating the artist, technology, and the viewer.
EL Putnam: PseudoRandom
January 25 - March 26, 2023
Putnam creates dreamy visuals, generative animated patterns, and dramatic sonic effects with datamoshing – a form of intentional image glitching – and computer programming. Her multi-sensory performance-to-camera videos challenge the picture frame by intentionally exceeding the rectangle of the ubiquitous Zoom window. Her live performances make visible the labor that responds to and produces biometric data, presenting the artist’s body as a database of lived experience.
In PseudoRandom, meandering videos artfully document Putnam’s role as a parent and offer intimate, tender portraits of the artist and her two daughters. The various video performances explore physical, digital, and virtual modalities and expand performance art beyond lens-based media. The artist questions how time, space, and social contexts collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through performed actions, data collection, moving images, and sound, Putnam redefines the maternal in provocative and unexpected ways. She establishes and challenges new relational dynamics between her body, the camera, and the viewer. She then expands this entanglement by integrating the digitally tracked data of her everyday actions. In doing so, Putnam offers us a way to re-imagine her – and ourselves – as embodied digital subjects.