Digital Steve

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The concept for this video came about due to my cynical nature. The theme is clearly circles,

with the majority of the video juxtaposing day and night to show how life continuously moves

in circles. There is nothing overly complicated involved in the video, I just wanted to show

that while life definitely changes slightly each day, it is pretty much the same.

I made the video simple because I felt like my concept was simple. I didn't overcomplicate

any of the footage and I kept the same audio throughout essentially the whole piece. The

audio was supposed to imitate a clock, which signified time, which ended up being a sort

of sub theme. I used the digital clock to display the time as either day or night, but the

subtheme was that time moves in circles as well. I'm proud of how it turned it, because

I think the arrangement makes my theme easy to grasp.

Jason Salavon is a digital artist who graduated from The Art Institute of Chicago. "It's dense out there. It's a world of massively interconnected networks, a world of traffic jams and paper trails. A world teeming with life and movement. A place of information and data. My work and the software I write for it investigates the manipulation, reorganization, and/or generation of immense data sets common to American life” (Quote by Jason). This sums up what he does quite nicely. To put it in friendlier terms, he incorporates more than one type of media into a lot of his pieces. He is currently teaching digital installation, experimental computer programming and 3-D computer animation.

Salavon uses custom computer software to manipulate and later media into original compilations of art. The majority of Salavon’s work utilizes existing art, which he then manipulates in two primary ways. First, he uses an overlay method of multiple images to create an amalgamation, which essentially means an image out of many images. These amalgamations look at first glance like blurry photographs, but really they are just the result of meticulous digital reconfiguration.

Salavon’s other primary method is redistributing existing media side by side to show some form of narrative. In his most famous piece, The Highest Grossing Film of All Time, 1x1, Salavon created a still image of the entire film Titanic. He took the average color of each frame from the film and laid them out in a left to right, top to bottom format. He has done this with other films and with other types of media, but this is his most hailed work of art.

Salavon is also highly regarded as a video artist. In his work “The Late Night Triad” Salavon made an astounding compilation of Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman. He recorded hundreds of hours on these late night shows and averaged the color and audio feed to create an almost 4 minute video that played 192 episodes simultaneously. I found this to be a rather brilliant concept.

When I first googled Jason Salavon I was slightly disappointed with the results. I saw a bunch of blurry pictures and thought that his work was rather dull. After doing some research and learning what went into those digital installations, I take back what I originally thought. Visually Salavon does not create beautiful things, but I can tell he has a rather ingenious and creative mind. He seems to be thinking outside of the box, while also remaining one step ahead of the curve. I feel like his work at first glance can be underrated, by say, a college student. The pieces don’t really “work” in my opinion, but the ideas behind the images and/or videos are brilliant.