So last year, you gave visitors an intro to urban alchemy, the transmogrification of common public infrastructure into rare moments of unauthorized culture. Did your group create or discover any urban alchemy? What inspired you to make the first pixelator?
JE: I focused on developing a way of seeing, so we didn’t actually transmogrify anything during our walk, but we did brainstorm a lot of really great ideas, including turning sidewalk friction strips into music staffs and newsracks into aquariums.
The Pixelator has a lot of prior art. I’d seen what Ji Lee (Abstractor) and the Anti-Advertising Agency and Graffiti Research Lab (Light Criticism) had done, and I saw some work by Aram Bartholl (TV Filter) and I just put two and two together and stuck it on the street and documented it in a compelling way, and it blew up.
Is the night market video available yet? Are you able to tell readers anything about it? Can you tell us about your Conflux project this year?
JE: Alas, Surprise Surveillance Theater documentation has been a monster to edit. It’s coming, I’m just not sure when yet. We got a nice mention in Wired, though!
This year for Conflux my frequent co-conspirator Jen Small and I are proposing a project titled “Be My Mayor”, based on something we did last year called “Tag Me On Flickr As…” It’s a weekend-long bet that involves stalking, lots of free drinks, and Foursquare. Did we just make Foursquare creepier? MAYBE.
Your friend Matt Green has now walked from New York to North Dakota and you’ve built a blog to tell his story geographically. Do you think the internet and gps applications are changing the way we interact with our environment, or vice versa—is the internet geotagging the environment, or is the environment geotagging the internet?
JE: Man, that guy is almost in Wyoming now! He is a walking machine!
Locative technology is undoubtedly changing the way we understand and interact with the world. We get lost less, we travel more efficiently, we look at maps more, all for better or for worse. One interesting shift, I believe, is that we increasingly understand our spatial contexts primarily from a top down view, rather than from the ground, because of the pervasiveness of internet maps and directions.
But there is freedom in order. One of the best things about the Manhattan grid is that it encourages exploration. You can’t get too lost if you know how the streets and avenues are numbered, and so you have more freedom to improvise.
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Jason Eppink was originally trained as a filmmaker in Los Angeles though he quickly realized following this path would have him running coffee for the next few years before doing anything mildly creative. And Jason doesn’t know the first thing about coffee. After hosting a long-running public access television show, finishing a few art films, and dabbling in viral video, he finally just gave in to this whole Art thing.
Informed by his years in film, as well as an interest in programming and the open source movement (where applicable, he distributes his own source code) Jason likes to engage the public with victimless pranks, street art, and interactive sculpture. As a result, much of his recent work falls somewhere in the gray area between art, prank, and activism. Really, Jason just likes to think he is a dude who is making things a little better.
When he’s not doing whatever it is you call what he’s doing, Jason serves as a curator at a museum in New York City that doesn’t want to be publicly associated with any of his mischief.
Jason is currently working on a documentary about AC Window Units, generously funded by Queens Council on the Arts.
He is also leading a mystery bus tour July 10th called “Rock the Block” at Flux Factory (Sign up for their e-mail list @ http://fluxfactory.org to reserve seats when they’re announced.)
Find out more about Jason Eppink’s exploits on jasoneppink.com
