Duncan Malashock is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker whose work we have featured before — that being his 2006 piece, Road, and Pyramid (2008). His work was featured in the recent REFRESH exhibit at the AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media. Duncan makes “analog videos that are concerned with the history of creative technology.” He also makes interactive websites and recently started making sculptural pieces using projections. Duncan was born 1982, San Diego, southern California, and graduated Bard College 2005, BA Integrated Arts.

(1) What do you make and what aesthetics do you pursue?
I’m interested in our relationship with technology, specifically within the context of the Internet as a day-to-day activity, and in light of the history of the use of technology as a way of representing ideals. I make analog videos that are concerned with the history of creative technology, and in exploring what I understand as the ideals of early computer art. I also make interactive websites as public artwork, and that work emphasizes exploring interaction and simulations as their own media. Lately I’ve also started making sculptural pieces using projections, either from laser light or digital projector, which explore both of these sets of ideas, with a focus on the interaction between the ”immaterial” content and physical spaces and objects.

Temple
Digital video, 2009

(2) Your thirst for inspiration: what is something you love, but can not get enough of? Does your thirst for this inspire and guide your art; how does your work correspond with its influences?
I think most of my interests come from my background. I’m from Southern California, so that’s probably why I’m obsessed with ideas like self-created identity, lifestyle marketing, and the possibilities of technology, our understanding of which has largely been shaped by the Californian intersection of phenomena like the Human Potential Movement and Silicon Valley. My dad is a modern dance choreographer, so that’s probably why I’m interested in the expressive qualities of motion and physical performance, both of which are involved a lot, both actively and latently in my work. Simulations come up a lot in my work as a way of exploring these interests. Sometimes an interactive or static simulation of an object or process will form the basis for a new piece. I’m always reading when I’m working on something, and often times that manifests itself in the form of subjects or titles for pieces.
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