Google Portrait
Gryphon Rue and Benton C Bainbridge
2018, Series of Digital Media HD videos in Singular Editions, silent, running times vary
Google Portrait is a series of media artworks offered in Singular Editions with decentralized provenance via artHash.
Google Portrait is an invention; a mythical entity; a state of mind; a spiritual problem. It abides in an immaterial coat of arms, an appendage to the Cloud. It is the hidden visage of a quasi-religious institution—like Capital itself.
Rue shot Portraits, then Bainbridge patched together a studio full of artifact-inducing hardware and software as an image processing system to push pixels beyond the edge of representational functionality.
Footage was fed through obsolete gear and prototype video synth modules, modified mixers and hacked TiVos, rescanned and scan converted and down-rezzed to lofi SD glory. This process was repeated hundreds of times over many months; then, the analog passes were digitally captured, up-rezzed, shredded with filters and mashed up with each other, in sequences a hundred layers deep:
Hackintosh computer running Vidvox VDMX →
ScanDo Pro scan converter →
analog Eurorack modular Video Synth with Dave Jones prototypes → hacked Sony TiVo digital video delay →
customized Panasonic WJ-MX50A video stitcher →
Black magic Intensity capture card →
souped-up MacBook Air running Adobe After Effects with Red Giant Trapcode and dozens of other filters →
Adobe Media Encoder →
artHash.
Pixel painting: Benton C Bainbridge
Director & editor: Gryphon Rue
ASL consultant: Christopher Tester
Starring:
Gryphon Rue
Christine Sun Kim
Dean Wareham
Ellie Nash
Aubree Niishay
RJ Van Brussel
Lucas Gomez
Teigen Horowitz