Shane Cooper
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Shane Cooper is an installation artist from Germany, specializing in Internet and interactive art.
He works in the special effects field, and has contributed work to such films as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. He has worked with musicians, such as Devo in Santa Monica, California in 1996 and Graham Nash in Los Angeles, in 1995.
There are many common themes emphasized in Cooper’s works. Most of them feature interactivity with the viewer and computer learning. In many of his works, the actions of the viewer are somehow recorded and later used in the art itself.
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[edit] Installation art
In Cooper’s art installation “Remote Control”, a television displays an anchorman that looks and sounds real, yet is completely computer-generated. The newscast being shown is generated in real-time, using feeds from various Internet news sources. A remote control with two buttons, labeled “Truth 1” and “Truth 2”, allows the viewer to choose between two channels: one where the news being reported is true, and one where the facts have been reversed.
In “Reflection” (also known as “Parasight”), the viewer stands in front of a wall that has an image of another person, standing in a similar way as them, projected onto it. When the viewer moves in any way, the image projected on the screen changes to match the new way that the viewer is standing. The result is that the viewer sees their “reflection” on the screen, except that the reflection is in fact the image of a previous visitor. In addition, every viewer is also filmed and added to the database of images that can be projected. In this way, every new viewer adds to the exhibit, and increases the accuracy of the next viewer's reflection.
Cooper is currently working on "The Adam and Eve Project", which seeks to discover what happens when images of many people are averaged together. In early tests by Cooper, three nude pictures of each participant were taken: the front of their body, the back of their body, and their face. The images were then blended together to create a "calculated" image. The resulting photographs looked like a person that did not resemble any of the original participants. Pleased by the results, Cooper began to carry out the project using higher-resolution images and more participants. Anyone may now participate in the project by submitting their images at Cooper's website. The project will create three images (front, back, and face) for each gender, and an overall average between both genders.
[edit] Internet art
Shane has also created several Internet art works which appear at his personal website.
“Live” is a simulated chatroom, which is actually full of bots. The bots learn new conversations from the humans that come into the room, which is another example of Cooper's recurring theme of the viewer leaving an impression on the artwork itself. It also features a “live webcam” that is actually a series of images that repeat over and over, with only the timestamp changing.
“Caption” is a black web page showing only an image and a string of text. Usually, the pair appears to have a meaning of some sort, making it seem like the text was written specifically to go with the image. However, the image and text are chosen completely at random. (This can be verified by simply reloading the page until the same image appears twice, in which case it will most likely be matched with a different text string.) The project serves to illustrate how the human mind will find a link between any two randomly matched items.
[edit] Notable exhibitions
- Various items at F.I.L.E. Electronic Language International Festival in São Paulo 1999
- Various items atVisionNetwork in Tokyo 1999
- Remote Control in Karlsruhe, Germany 1999-2001
- Remote Control in Berlin 2001
- Remote Control in Graz, Austria 2001
- Reflection at Intermedium2 in Karlsruhe, Germany 2002
- Reflection at Volkswagen AG in Berlin 2002
- Remote Control in Vectors: Digital Art in our Time New York 2003
- Remote Control in Experimenta's House of the Future Melbourne 2003
- Reflection in Ciber:Art Bilbao 2004 in Bilbao Spain
- Remote Control in Reality Show, Aarau, Switzerland, 2005
- Live in Radiodays, De Appel Center for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam 2005
- Remote Control in Kunstfest Weimar, "Masterpieces of Art from the ZKM Karlsruhe Collection", The Bauhaus, Weimar, Germany, 2005
- Reflection at Ottawa School of Art, Ottawa, Canada, 2005
- Feed at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, 2006
