iterative video installation
188" x 144" projected image, variable height
a static-flavored shape is an iterative video installation articulating psychological spaces and silent narratives specific to the experience of pacific islanders and the unique dysphoria that results from inter-generational trauma. The work is an attempt to create a type of “dissonant ethnography” centered around the abstraction of qualitative data, culled from personal memory, familial oral histories and online investigations. Themes addressed specifically include centrality of event as it pertains to the construction of identity in individuals who have experienced trauma, noise aesthetics as an analog for cultural dysphoria, and the immaterial as signifier.
“street echoes ’ēheu—and it sure is” Pacific-sourced sea salt, near-infrared lamps, digital video projection 7:00
Iteration developed for inclusion in The Snake, curated by Kristan Kennedy and exhibited at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
The methamphetamine epidemic that first took hold of O’ahu in the mid-1980s continues to ravage urban pacific island communities. It is a phenomenon that has redefined our homes, neighborhoods, legal system and cultural milieu, but remains largely absent in wider discussions of experience and survivance. Here, the expression of this condition is abstracted and exploded, mapping space through visual disturbance, skewed perspectives and the ambient qualities of media engagement.
Employing an aesthetic centered upon the deconstruction of cinematic experience, the installation purposefully decenters the moving image, placing it on low on the floor, at an architectural scale too slim to inhabit but too large to provide an ideal perspective. Viewing, then, becomes a conscience act, situating the viewer decidedly out of frame, unimmersed. The platform on which the projection is captured is coated in Pacific-sourced sea salt, a finish both delicate and restrictive, its crystalline properties adding another dimension of grain to the static-heavy image. To further highlight this disparity between “inside” and “outside”, infrared lights are suspended at irregular points surrounding the low plinth, creating zones of heat and a subtle glow beyond the assumed boundary of the installation. This negotiation of exhibition space vs. installation space, an intentional blurring of borders, also denotes the ambient environment constructed as a key element to the moving image, focusing on the narratives obscured by subjective observation, or hidden in the ephemeral.
Photo by Chris Rohrer.
“grazed my neck w/ a burnt piece of land in liliha” ceramic, activated charcoal, micro-bead glass, near-infrared lamps, digital video projection 7:00
Iteration developed for the Honolulu Biennial 2019, curated by Scott Lawrimore, Nina Tonga & Devon Bella.
July 13 - 29, 2018
Thirdroom (Portland, Oregon, USA)
Group exhibition curated by Nicole Baker, Vanessa Englund & Kalaija Mallery. Featuring work by DB Amorin, Nicole Baker, Christina Smiros, Rachel Wolf, Jenifer Yeuroukis.
“This is an exhibition of expanded cinema, interpreted as we please for the digital era. We deconstruct linear narratives, incorporate performance, encourage participation, break cinema down to pure light and image, and beyond. This is DIY spectacle, home-grown razzle dazzle.
This exhibition is not about boundaries, it is about transgression through media. We will further expand the idea of expanded cinema.”
Includes:
huli (don’t you ever wonder where the boys in us went), 2018 UV reactive paint, fluorescent UV light bulbs, single-channel video 03:38
“for mala and all the girls she met — the ones who fought back.”
acrylic, lead, various pacific-sourced products
2.75" x 2.75" x 2.75"
amnesty box is an iterative sculpture series addressing the impossibility of export of a tropical aesthetic from island cultures.
amnesty box (honey), 2018 acrylic, lead, raw kaiwe honey
Raw white honey harvested on the island of Hawai’i is sealed in an opaque black acrylic container, its 3 fluid ounce chamber lined with lead. It is an object that can never be shipped or transferred via cargo on a commercial airliner across the Pacific, lest it be destroyed or confiscated by TSA or agricultural officers during inspection. A slightly foreboding & enigmatic homage to the hyperreal layer of gloss that radiates from all things “tropical” – the authentic fakeness that belies its cultural fixity and undeniable function. Situated low to the ground, camouflaged by its own reflective surface and the tropical plants that surround it as part of its installation. What can and cannot be exported and how are the sweetest parts of the tropics obscured and protected by its own synthetic shine?
x-routes, magnified (tho MOST sharp as a WHEN) is a site-specific video projection designed for display at Luggage Store Gallery for the Tropical Disturbance exhibition (January 19 – February 22, 2018).
As a member of a multi-generational family from Hawai’i, and a person of Azorean-Samoan heritage, I am interested in the unique frame of reference diasporic identity manifests and how it can be translated visually. There is a specific dysphoria that emanates from an island and lingers in its people, a sensation permanently embedded in one’s genetic material. By capturing footage of ocean surf at the origins of my cultural & ethnic heritage, a space of suspension between a past and future self is formed. An ontological tension is revealed through multiple views of the waters of Hawai’i and Portugal, caught midway between submerged and afloat, an unflinching perspective that glides from crest to trough in perpetuity. This condition is heightened by treating the video footage with circuit-bent analog filters, mixed live with stutters, glitches and washes of color that create a sense of the sublime – a spectacle that is both awe-inspiring and overwhelming. The act of such processing, of manipulating video signal, draws attention to the materiality of video as an analog to the composite & mutable nature of identity.
The waves’ relentless roll, the deafening crush and soft effervescence of surf, the mercurial reflections of sky and sand are amplified as glitch-heavy, prismatic visual metaphor, designed to arrest and elevate. This is a narrative of turbulence – one without trajectory, absent of identifiers, devoid of connotative elements that would typically guide a story of diaspora. It is a cyclical motion that speaks its truth as gentle washes and bad frames, codified errors and blurred horizons.
huli is a hyperlinked narrative, a collection of strobed vignettes centered upon a single unnamed character in perpetual jumpcut. This is a story told through approximations, whose truth is ambient and lingers in neon half-frames, in weightless spaces suspended between when it happened once and when it happened again. This is a condition passed in circles, leaping over generation gaps, written into code and manifested in all the noises and ticks, glitches and fits. It is one of many entries in an atlas of Liliha war crimes.
From press materials:
db amorin’s latest collection of modular videos presents itself in purposeful disarray, an unreality recalled in ultra definition. this multi-screen installation entitled huli is a study in anachronism, reflection & the cyclical signal of epigenetic inheritance.
“to turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living. to look for, search, explore, seek, study; search, investigation; scholarship. section, as of a town, place, or house.”
Special thanks to Renee Sills, Sarah Turner and all of the staff at Open Signal, Lauren Moran and the IPRC, Cyan Bott, Kasey Shun and everyone else who contributed talents & time, thoughts & guidance on this project.
June 2 - July 2, 2017
Open Signal (Portland, Oregon USA)
a series of slips: not unified, but d i s p e r s e d, not whole but towards holism, not perforated like a sieve but built like a weaving.
db amorin’s latest collection of modular videos presents itself in purposeful disarray, an unreality recalled in ultra definition. this multi-screen installation entitled huli is a study in anachronism, reflection & the cyclical signal of epigenetic inheritance.
“to turn, reverse; to curl over, as a breaker; to change, as an opinion or manner of living. to look for, search, explore, seek, study; search, investigation; scholarship. section, as of a town, place, or house.”
hannah piper burns will be sharing skincare tips, a series of short video poems made from commercials, instructional videos, and her own text. she will also offer two multimedia treatments that combine esthetic technologies with scavenged and re-purposed brand magic.
About Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship Program:
Open Signal’s New Media Fellowship is a brand new, onsite 2.5-month residency for artists and media-makers, which provides them with access to Open Signal’s equipment, studios and resources.
This fellowship immerses artists in a culture of independently-produced media as they develop their practices. Throughout their residencies, New Media Fellows collaborate with Open Signal staff and producers to create new work and provide innovative programming to our community.
video projection, platform, plexiglass, water, four-channel audio
dimensions variable
geophasms is an on-going series of expanded cinema presentations. Exploring a concept I refer to as “dissonant ethnography” I aim to use projection-based installation in ways that uniquely alter perceived narrative, making the experience not only site-specific but viewing-specific, a culmination of intentionally random coincidences with perceptual and physical filters that disrupt or realign the media as it occurs. It is an attempt to produce an episodic, modular documentary film describing the unique ontology of the Polynesian diasporic experience by examining a minute facet, a subculture, or otherwise fringe occurrence that doesn’t necessarily speak for the whole but is nevertheless descriptive of an idiosyncratic reality that exists within the larger cultural spectrum. The distortions inherent in any subjective description of events are heightened and highlighted through the series of willful obfuscations, intentional deletions and randomization. geophasms is a system of cinema that operates as a type of feedback loop, one that actively disturbs itself.
The first presentation, geophasms (went split afakasi), is a collection of cinéma & audio vérité produced on O’ahu, Hawai’i in early 2016. Conversations between family members discussing the reality of life in Hawai’i as Samoan-Azorean immigrants, as queer people, as disoriented progeny of cultural assimilation, as current navigators of extreme socioeconomic disparities. The image and sound are contained on separate loops, each presented in asynchronous revolutions that never align. To further abstract the presentation and to highlight the gaps in knowledge and veracity of observation, two elements are introduced: a reflective, black mirrored tank of water and binaural low-frequency tones. The image is projected into the tank and bounced onto the screen, while the loops of low-frequency tones are fed into the soundtrack. The result is a purposeful severance of the cinematic experience, with the image destroying itself via pattern interference and the soundtrack receding into the deluge of noise.
The second installment, geophasms (sheer mala copy), was exhibited at Bronco Gallery in October 2016 and produced specifically for the interior of a 1991 Ford Bronco. This installation was comprised of a single-channel digital video projection and two separate stereo audio tracks played within and around the stationary automobile. Visitors were invited to sit inside the cab of the gallery, listening to conversations unfold between an absent driver and passenger as they “talk story” while navigating the island of Kaua’i. The separate audio tracks are edited into asynchronous loops, so that ambient field recordings of surf, traffic, marketplaces and island radio stations from the rear-mounted external speakers drown out portions of the internal dialogue, giving each viewer a unique experience. High-definition video captured from the dashboard of the original vehicle are projected onto the windshield of the surrogate, the Bronco Gallery, in a third asynchronous loop.
From press materials:
“sheer mala copy” is a fleeting iteration of an on-going series of expanded cinema presentations entitled geophasms. Talking story is a ubiquitous cultural element in Polynesia, unstructured discussions of issues pertaining to daily life, family history or spirituality. It is a method of knowledge transference, an oral tradition that has permeated all aspects of life in the Pacific and works to elongate time in multiple directions. It has the power to expand a casual afternoon stop-in into a full day dialogue, and a memory of a car ride into a multi-generational timeslip. Here, talking story is further mediated through extensive use of the cut-up technique to create small loops of interlocking narratives and concrete poetry, deviations of time and space, fifth dimensional exchanges of knowledge. These conversations recorded on the islands of O’ahu and Kaua’i have been transposed to the interior of Bronco Gallery.
loud curve is a site-specific video & web installation for exhibition at White Gallery in Portland, OR. The exhibition serves as a screening of modular video clips (its loud curve clip A, its loud curve clip B) produced for inclusion in larger, immersive web-based installations. The work explores the areas created through projection, the concept of biocentrism as applied to virtual space and the fractured experience of immersive technologies. Included as a companion to the video diptych is a piece optimized for mobile viewing, its loud curve clip C, viewable as a web component at loudcurve.dbamorin.com.
From press materials:
“Clips of gradient wash, stereo focus and big static form a liminal space built for endless granulation. A string of modular experiences, an elastic strip of strobed positions. Expressed as generative looking, this window is a destination not a frame. A landscape compiled and rendered on contact. A motion to unfollow. Resting somewhere between loose projection and spectral object, this area is ready to be undefined together. loud curve is a partial view of something else incomplete entirely.”
Opening reception: May 2, 2015 5 – 8PM @ Littman Gallery, Portland OR USA
On View at White Gallery: May 2 – 27, 2015
Raspberry Pi hardware, loudspeakers, digital print, audio cassettes
dimensions variable
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Stream Room is a collaborative multi-channel musique concrete sound installation conceptualized and produced for deepwhitesound, an online exhibition platform for experimental audio. The installation was exhibited at FalseFront in Northeast Portland from Oct 11 – Nov 2, 2014 and cycled through over 600 compositions by 33 international sound artists.
“Hundreds of micro-compositions produced by dozens of international sound artists and musicians are randomly sequenced and broadcast via wi-fi to handmade streaming units. Each collected composition is designed to be played simultaneously as an immersive sound installation.
The result is a cacophonous, randomized bombast of disparate experimental compositions, playing over and against each other, an aural metaphor of the chaotic and over-stimulating nature of the internet itself. The discord of battling sound sources and quickly transitioned content creates a type of meditative experience. Rather than aiming to reach transcendence through minimalism, senses are bombarded and inundated in a type of maximalism. The dissonant nature of the installation draws allusions to the overwhelming qualities of the internet, social media and the information age.
Stream Room serves as an appraisal of this condition, an errant signal celebrated, a space for enthralled annihilation.”
Stream Room was funded by a generous grant from the Precipice Fund, administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art with lead support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation/Allie Furlotti.
OPENING RECEPTION
6 – 10pm
Saturday, September 27 2014
with a performance by
DOLPHIN MIDWIVES
As we find our minds filled with the reckless psychic effluvia of generations of consumerism and technical trickery, minds break down under the burden. In an effort to release the excesses and construct an unadulterated vision we welcome artists and observers to ease the pain…. through the ritual of Collage Binge.
leave ee dummy clip is a web animation exploring transparency, moire interference and css/html manipulation. Using scans of discarded paper pieces, negative space becomes sequenced in split-second loops, building upon and obstructing its own composition. Created in conjunction with ‘waste not, want not.’ a digital exhibition curated by Shaun Kardinal.
‘waste not, want not.’ was a digital exhibition occurring on Facebook, July 3, 2014. Conceived, directed and curated by Shaun Kardinal, the exhibition invited 13 artists to use a 500px square grey (#e9eaef) canvas and Facebook’s limited post types as parameters for creating work that does not exist tangibly. Artists were encouraged to push the boundaries of the exhibition guidelines by using “digital photo/video/audio of an existing object or scene.” Participating artists were then given specific “post” times to stagger viewing by ten minute intervals until all works were available to be viewed by the public. Exhibited work included video files, web animation, experimental narratives, digital images and text.
sunset is an all-day process is a web-based animation for projection that randomly generates and scrolls shifting gradients over the course of 24 hours. Built on standard blog software, the website randomly loads a variety of individually crafted digital media (hand-cut and scanned colored paper, ink drawings, colored vector shapes, underwater video of the Pacific Ocean) and slowly layers, shifts and obscures each to create a fluid half-space that treats the browser window as a surrogate for the human eye. The liminal space along the surface of water, the transition between submerged and afloat, is illustrated here as a perpetual state of being. Caught forever between two familiar zones, ascension and descent are removed as possible actions and the viewer is unable to choose a course. Instead, one must surrender to a hybrid existence of two opposing arenas, one of safety and one of urgency.
June 1 - June 21, 2012
Olyphant Art & Gallery, Olympia, WA
An exhibit of work by local artists in Olympia, WA showcasing various printmaking techniques including monoprint, serigraphs, intaglio, woodcuts, lithography and photo transfers. Features a working print from the serigraph series dizzy w/o field order.
Artists with work featured:
Neil Peck
Amy Biggerstaff
Hannah Stephens
Luuk Honey
Tim Kenney
Kristen Edmund
Rhett Thomas Nelson
Laurel Henn
Nora McKinnon
Willis Samuel Ford Hoke
DB Amorin
Mary Evans
Morghan Wright-Johnson
Eric Grizzlyberg
Justin Crawford
Lois Beck
Ellen Miffit
Grace Ellis
Cate Bellanca
Kira Nelson
35mm macro photography, digital prints and colored pencil drawings
dimensions variable
lo–vis is a series of 35mm macro photographs and pencil drawing interpretations. Misusing macro lenses while shooting flowers, mosses and other foliage to create abstracted color field compositions, the imagery captured is then used as reference material for a laborious process of manual “printing” using colored graphite. Each piece represents a phase of a never-ending series of translations from reflected light to print to digital object to bands of approximate color, on and on towards an unknown inevitability. My interest in this process and presentation lies with the examination of what is lost and discovered through manual processes of translation.
lo-vis was exhibited in October 2014 at Weird Shift Storefront in Portland, OR USA, along with web component at lovis.dbamorin.com.
auto-zurich was a pop-up public installation hosted by Creative Research Co-Operative at its Cube Space on February 3, 2012. The presented video is comprised of approximately 485 blots, each individually painted by hand onto transparency, scanned and edited as frames for video. auto-zurich is a working project, to be expanded over time. Presented here is the first 42 seconds of the project. Showing from sundown until whenever.
January 23 - March 30, 2012
Gallery of Hawai'i Artists, Honolulu, HI
“Single World is a collection of self-portrait photographs by Honolulu-based artists Dana Paresa, Db Amorin, and Kate Burlingame. This body of work constitutes a collaboration between all three artists over a 2 year time span. The project was inspired through a myriad of sources from personal experience and raw materials to conceptual exploration. Comprised of roughly 25 photographs, Single World plays with the concept of fantasy in identity. Paresa, Amorin, and Burlingame dare to confront the suppressed expressions of identity; the detritus of our everyday existence that are often deemed illogical, unnatural, or dysfunctional due to their fantastical nature. Such expressions are brought to the forefront in this collection of dark, surreal, and outlandish photographs. Through the artists’ own introspective outlooks, we can begin to question our own and where our true personas may lie.”
– Carolyn Mirante, Curator/Owner of Gallery of Hawai’i Artists
OPENING RECEPTION + PREVIEW NIGHT:
Friday, January 20, 2012 from 6-9pm
Preview the exhibition before it officially opens on the 23rd
want it all to go highlights is a digital video loop comprised of manipulated photographic prints, manually altered with chemicals and re-scanned as individual frames of video.
June 10 - July 1, 2011
Gallery 'Iolani, Kaneohe, HI
Anomaly showcases the new work of artists Damion Rosbrugh and db amorin, running from June 10 – July 1, 2011 at Gallery ‘Iolani, as a pair of installations (Rosbrugh’s Neutrinos and Camembert and amorin’s One Sleeper Mass).
serigraph, video & photo installation
dimensions variable
one sleeper mass is a multi-media installation comprised of ten serigraphs, a video installation and a booklet of photography.
“A circuitous closed-eye route, an inside movement freed from physics. These images first took shape as a memory of childhood escapism, applying pressure to my eyelids which brought flashes of non-existent celestial bodies, drifting mash-ups of abstracted memory and epileptic visions of possibility. Revelatory and epiphanic, these inside journeys are without spatial or temporal limits – a second stretches miles, impossible forms ebb and flow, the body is irrelevant. Nothing takes shape until witnessed and everything unseen can be visited, from the deepest recesses of the subconscious to the furthest reaches of space-time.
Influenced by the random formations of bacteria and the mathematical compositions of 18th century star maps, these early explorations are reconstructed as a series of prints using light refractions from found glass and other transparent surfaces, mark-making with various mediums, and reductive print-making techniques. The search is also captured as a video loop which suggests progression and movement but offers no exact location, no concrete form – only the play of light, fluid and negative spaces.”
Displayed below are original screenprints, a selection of photographs from the booklet entitled another spin visit and an excerpt of the video one sleeper mass, original runtime 10:41.
Feeds is a collection of images made specifically for the Spring 2011 issue of Vice-Versa Magazine, an online creative works journal published by University of Hawai’i.
digital video loop installation
02:17, dimensions variable
slip mojave is a digital video loop of filmed cable malfunction. Installed in a pop-up group exhibition space hosted by the Creative Research Cooperative at its Cube Space in Honolulu, HI, April 2011.
CRC Zine is a self-published zine created by the Creative Research Cooperative featuring artwork and writing from various Honolulu based artists. Issue #3: Swimsuit Issue features a reproduction of a mixed media piece entitled Ode To K.G. ’93, a reference to Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
found out driving was created as a physical inspection of the area immediately surrounding the site of an automobile accident ten years earlier. The search was documented through video and the result is presented as a perpetual loop.
CRC Zine is a self-published zine created by the Creative Research Cooperative featuring artwork and writing from various Honolulu based artists. Issue #2 features a reproductions of three collages, EJJECTT ANGLO BKKGROUND LIKE TEESER, MY BROTHER BOOMBOOM COMMUNICATE and CAUGHT DEAD SINGING THE GREAT OTHER.
video & mixed media installation
dimensions variable
in heaven i think i’ll live in a house is mixed media video installation intended for public installation. A television triptych plays loops of constantly shifting manipulated photographs of invented, impossible structures and spaces, along with images of man-made signage and mark-making. White altars are constructed from found materials to display the video loops, materials which include broken furniture and bouquets of flowers, as a temporary memorial to the negative spaces left by human beings.
All materials used were found or recycled over a period of nine months, broken into stages. The first stage, collecting “found spaces”, consisted of taking extended walks through various neighborhoods in Honolulu, photographing private residencies absent of human activity as well as forgotten spaces (below overpasses, dead ends, corners & edges) that were home to vestiges of human communication in the form of graffiti, worn signs & weathered flyers. The second stage consisted of assembling the residential images into digital collages of impossible spaces, and the others into an animated video loop played at a high frame rate mash up of marks made by humans. The final stage was preparing the physical installation by searching through trash left on roads for working television sets and broken furniture, which was then wheat-pasted and painted in white. Dead flowers were also slowly collected from the trash bins of a local cemetary, left to dry and finally painted white before exhibition.
chemotion.org is a collection of random-access web-based art, one of many forms of an ongoing project started in 1999. Prior to 2007, it has been home to experimental design, photographic collage and text-based work updated infrequently and at whim. Since, it has primarily exhibited randomized content in the form of scanned images of found or manipulated objects.
Currently, it displays SRTR, a randomized glitch, color-field “paintings” comprised of over 15,000 hand-drawn “pixels”, scanned, manually sliced and sorted / unsorted by blog software.
