Saturday October 23, 12-8pm
Joseph Moore
The Inhabitants 2021/10/23
Screening — Artist in attendance
Microscope presents an 8-hour screening of The Inhabitants 2021/10/23 by New York-based artist Joseph Moore on Saturday October 23rd from 12pm to 8pm. For this presentation, Moore will screen a random selection of 83 time-lapsed recordings from his ongoing video project The Inhabitants (2014-present). In the work, non-human animals are observed for 24 hours in their man-made environments through the eyes of unsecured web cameras accessed by the artist to examine the animals’ use as labor, entertainment, and their relation with human economy.
From Joseph Moore:
“In 2014 I began making recordings of non-human animals using unsecured IP cameras. These recordings take place at sites of domesticity (the family home), scientific discovery (the laboratory), industrial production (the farm), and entertainment (the zoo). Each recording is done for 24 hours at 1 frame every 10 seconds and played back at 25 frames per second, compressing the morphology of each day into a less detailed 5 minutes and 45 seconds.
These works engage in dialogue with, but also as a counterpoint to, early photography and pre-cinema, particularly the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. While Muybridge and especially Marey’s work sought to produce a positivist understanding where movement is dissected by regular intervals of time, I wish to call into question the continuity of the sequence and with it the staging of narrative in the production and transmission of instrumental knowledge. Unlike Marey’s exacting elaboration of a brief moment into a set of points in chronological time, in my work a frenetic and grotesque visual description of a day in a given animal’s life world is given.
For Microscope, I will screen 83 recordings from my archive selected at random and spanning a time of 8 hours. 8 hours is an interval of time that for many seems to demarcate the separation of labor and leisure within the day. By containing the work within that interval I hope to foreground the place many non-humans have within our economic system as cheap, unrecognized labor. Non-human animals produce affective labor in the home, entertainment in zoos, knowledge in laboratories, and in many cases provide the raw material to produce food and other commodities. I have no interest in metaphor here, I do not wish to use non-humans as a stand-in for humans. Rather, I am interested in how the non-human is deeply imbricated in the life of the human, so much so that that distinction between the terms human and non-human reveal their categorical ambiguity.”
Admission is free and audience may enter or exit at any time.
Please note: Proof of vaccination for Covid-19 and masks required.
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Joseph Moore is an artist who lives and works in New York. His conceptual practice utilizes a variety of media, from chemical and computation photography to video and computer-based networks. His recent work investigates photography’s relationship to the non-human, labor, and temporality. His work has been exhibited in venues such as The NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Microscope Gallery, NY, NY; MH Project, NY, NY; WORM, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Arebyte, London, England; The New Museum, NY, NY; and is found in such collections as The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell. He received his B.F.A. from The Atlanta College of Art and his M.F.A. from Bennington College.
This event is free to the public and is made possible through support from the City Artists Corps Grant administered by New York Foundation for the Arts, in partnership with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.