Peter Sarkisian at CAC

Extruded Video Engine: Katrina Series
through Oct 6, 2008
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans

When I saw the Extruded Video Engines at the CAC they wowed me with their fun pseudo 3-D video-projection-on-vacuform effect. I thought they were playful but then I started listening to them. The gears and cranks (with the exceptions of the bubbles - they add a Frankenstein factor) suddenly seemed retro , like a celebratory nostalgia for a past in which things worked. Combined with the audio of news media reportage from 2005, the effect became sinister. I recalled the moment on Sept 2nd 2005, when any leftover belief I had in what the media said was shattered. The specter of the inner workings, the gears and such, allude to outmoded forms of machination, and function as a purposely outdated metaphor for how things happen (supposedly Sarkisian videotaped the crazy mechanical things at Los Alamos). The pieces insist on transparency, but it's false - a "look, this is really how things work" feel, when we know that this is NOT at all how it works, and it's just an illusion. It's the illusion of civil organization, of democracy, of an unbiased media. Each wall piece felt like a blob with some knobs and gears hot-glued on the top of it to make it appear official. The sinister aspect of the pieces is the part that works for me.
An art-going pal told me that he'd seen the work before in NYC, but without the Katrina reference. That made me wonder: are these pieces like a template over which anything would work? an illusory machine that has an input and an output, and whatever comes in is transformed when it comes out? Whatever the case, I think it works to add in the Katrina references, but hey, talk about preaching to the choir. Will the Extruded Video Engine: Katrina Series show outside of the Gulf Coast? Or is the engine just like the media machines it parodies, endlessly going from one opportunity to the next?
Here are my ratings, on a scale of 1(worst) to 10(super-duper best):
gee-whiz factor: 10
shoe-horn factor (making it fit in New Orleans) 10
tacky: 10
techie: 10