GX Jupitter-Larsen
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GX Jupitter-Larsen is an artist, based in Hollywood, California, who has been active in a number of underground art scenes since the late 1970s.
He has been involved in punk rock, mail art, cassette culture, the noise music scene, and zine culture. During the 1990s he was the sound designer for the performances of Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories. His best known work is as the founder of the noise act The Haters, who have performed all over the world, and appear on over 300 CD & record releases.
Underlying all of Jupitter-Larsen's work is a peculiar mix of aesthetic and conceptual obsessions, particularly entropy and decay, professional wrestling, and a self-created lexicon consisting mainly of personalized units of measurement such as polywave, the totimorphous, and the xylowave.
In 1981, Jupitter-Larsen decreed all vacant lots in every city as monuments to entropy. So, regardless what city you're in, if you see a vacant lot, you'll be looking at an untitled readymade sculpture of his.
The transexpansion numeral unit (TNU) was invented in 1985 by Jupitter-Larsen to explore what he called "the distance & separateness in between linear counting locations that don't neighbor each other." When arranged in order, the TNUs form a spiral around the standard linear numbers. If one assumes that each individual linear number is a particular location along a counting order, then each individual TNU would be the distance between two selected linear number locations. Where the TNUs have been placed is unimportant. What is important is that anyone can make up their own personal numbers to symbolize any numeral interrelationship that Jupitter-Larsen's don't. Instead of a way of doing arithmetic, what you end up with here is an emotional & philosophical barometer: I (pronounced a) is located in between 1&4 but not 2&3.
In 1994, skydiving with a large drill-bit in hand, Jupitter-Larsen "drilled a hole through the sky."
Jupitter-Larsen is also a filmmaker and video artist. From 1982 to 1986, he submitted a black video tape entitled Blank Banner to over forty video festivals. It was screened in nine. His best known video is his 1994 Holes On The Neck. In this piece, the vampire-movie motif is incorporated to deal with the issue of entropy as fetish. The narrative is of a group of lesbian vampires who work and play on their garlic farm. Their human lovers desire to become vampires themselves, and so lure these garlic farmers into initiating them into the fold.
In his 1997 Change In The Weather a visitation gives a professor the inspiration to invent a gadget that transforms the lives of him and his friends. The sum worked out by his friends while counting grains of sand is the key in getting the contraption to work. Amplified erosion is used as the soundtrack, because as Jupitter-Larsen puts it: "without erosion, there wouldn't be any sand to count."
