Kodak

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
33:19 minutes

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories. The artist tells the story of a fictional man named Rich, a former employee of the Kodak photography company. Through a visual collage of old Kodak advertisements, the artist’s family photos, and CGI animation, the audience learns more about Rich, who was blinded in a workplace accident and lost his family due to his divorce. The work takes inspiration from Wilson’s own autobiographical story, as his father worked at Kodak for many years as a film technician before getting fired, and often alongside blind individuals who were specially hired to work in darkrooms due to their strong sensorial skills. The viewer follows Rich as he goes through a library’s archive of audio recordings made by Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, recalling the history and development of the company. The jellyfish—the earliest animal known to collect and remember information about its surroundings through its complicated nerve system—acts as an important symbol and metaphor for the work. Similar to the jellyfish, Rich helplessly tries to preserve knowledge of his own memories in an analog form which is out-of-date. The work ends with a 3D animation sequence in which Rich’s schizophrenic delusions are depicted within an apocalyptic scenario. This marks the inescapable realities of the age of digital post-production in which belief and memory can be easily manipulated. This work questions the current state of human memory, investigating new technologies used for its documentation, to problematize its relationship to capitalism and innovation in technology.

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist, curator, and filmmaker whose practice is mostly based in research and documentary. His works—ranging from videos, sculptures, drawings, and performance lectures, to photography and mixed-media—investigate and critique the aesthetics and inequalities of the corporate world and the myths of technology. He often explores the effects of globalization in the realms of labor, capital, and information, highlighting cases that involve misconduct. The aesthetics of his work often knowingly employ the same digital mechanisms produced by the corporate systems he critiques. Gaining access to and exposing the internal systems of corporations is a key element for the artist’s earlier work. His most well known work that investigates these themes is Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011). In his most recent works, Wilson has taken an interest in nonhuman entities, including mosquitos, dinosaurs, puppets, and oil pumps—using them as stand-ins for humans to explore human morality from a more “objective” perspective. They are often presented in endless loops to break the linearity of a traditional model of time, in which past, present, and future follow each other in a consecutive fashion.

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