A Canadian artist makes skits with parodies of the Internet and computing

Canadian artist Jeremy Bailey is a true one man band of the digital age. Autonomous and independent, this visual artist and performer acts as the protagonist of videos that he makes and edits in real time with a program of his creation while broadcasting them on the Internet or other closed platforms.

The computer screen thus becomes a support, frame and setting for brief audiovisual stories of an ironic and surreal nature in which Bailey parodies the functions and idiosyncrasies of the computer and its users.

The Visual Operating System, the of its creation, which allows it to carry out video performances live, stars SOS, a six-episode series produced by Canadian television in which Bailey illustrates its use with subtle irony and the slow and moderately enthusiastic tone, typical of the popular documentary and the videodemos commercials, which teach how to use popular programs.

The announcement man

During the Toronto Urban Film Festival, this allowed Bailey to become an ad man, replacing parts of his body with advertisements in the video Your ad here, which was projected on the Toronto subway monitors during the days of the festival. In this work, to determine the position of his arms in three-dimensional space, the artist combines his program with the Nintendo Wii controller.

"I made my first audiovisual action when my friend and teacher, the famous Canadian video artist Colin Campbell, died of cancer. In the video, titled Bye Bye Bye, the movements of my arms are synchronized so that they seem to move the screen in space," explains Bailey, who is quickly becoming one of the most coveted artists for the programmers of the multimedia festivals, which multiply during the spring and summer. summer.

The extensive casuistry of the topics covered by the artist, co-founder of the 640 480 collective, makes up a set of atypical mini master classes on new technologies, the use of computer programs and, in general, the tools that are used every day working with computers.

En Video terraform dance party, which premiered in his exhibition Machine Ego at the 2 of 2 Gallery in Toronto, Bailey places a system to generate three-dimensional worlds on his forehead, which allows him to create a virtual landscape literally by hitting his head, while illustrating the work process and reveals programmer tricks with dark humor.

in the choir war mail, conceived for exhibition at the HTTP Gallery in London, debuts a new with which the public participates in the action through their movements and sounds. Arming viewers with digital pens, the artist engages them in collectively writing a crazy email to his mother, while calmly continuing his game in a space video game.

Among the funniest pieces are Don't mouse around, where the nightmare of the exhausted programmer materializes in some fly cursors that take control of his inert body, and VideoPaint 3.0, in which Bailey uses a graphic program, which responds to his voice and his movements (with an image capture system ), to tell the irreverent story of an encounter in the desert between a pink snake and a green jaguar, represented by a six-pointed star and the face of Arafat, permanently threatened by an eraser bomb.

With the same program, in Transhuman dance recital #1, Bailey investigates the possibilities of dance and painting, transforming into a kind of wise-cracking octopus that uses its tentacles to paint and finally abandons itself to a carefree dance to the rhythm of a famous New Order song. There is no doubt… a star is born.