Platform
Current:
Jason Isolini
The Ballad of a Laborer
Viewable beginning Saturday November 19
Microscope is very pleased to present the official debut of “The Ballad of a Laborer,” a performative intervention within Google Maps, by Brooklyn-based artist Jason Isolini as part the “Platform” section of our website dedicated to the exhibition of net-based and digital art. The project will launch with a live, in-person navigation by the artist at the gallery on Saturday November 19th at 7:30pm ET.
“The Ballad of a Laborer” is an artwork existing online in the Brooklyn Navy Yard section of Google Maps to be experienced through its Street View feature. Isolini’s project was inspired in part by his discovery that the Navy Yard, as a privately owned property, is not accessible to Google Maps’ camera crews. All street views of the Navy Yard — as well as the digital objects, other photographic elements, and images of the artist performing — were mapped and added by the artist over the three years since the project began.
Because of the ephemeral nature of the project, what visitors find on Google Street View may change when Google periodically catches Isolini’s unauthorized contributions, as well as when the artist restores their deletions.
Jason Isolini writes about the project:
“Treating Street View as a stop-motion medium, the click-through experience of the Navy Yard can be understood as an expanded cinema that transforms the industrialized private/public space into an unexpected and animated feature. Developed over the course of three years through building constellations of imagery captured on-site, the covertly published media functions as both a map of previously unseen virtual territory, and as a performance work.
Beyond a linear story, the omni-directional imagery creating paths throughout the gated space present interactive narrative possibilities and geographic trajectories reminiscent of land-art. Connecting ideas of occupation to digital surveillance technologies, the story of a laborer — performed by me — unfolds as I look for a way out of the virtual architecture. The space of the Navy Yard becomes a theatrical set for playful spectacle intervening in the spatial meaning, representation, and perceived neutrality of virtually rendered terrain.”
“The Ballad of a Laborer” will also be exhibited and available for viewers to explore in its complete and uncensored form on our site beginning after the event at: microscopegallery.com/platform
This launch event marks the first time that Isolini is publicly claiming the project as an artistic work. To date, images and videos of the work that have been virally shared across the internet have only referenced the user name, “Loosii Ninjas,” representing a scrambling of Isolini’s full name, under which he uploaded his content.
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Jason Isolini is a Brooklyn-based artist, whose network interventions test the increased conflation of corporate, public and private environments. His work has previously been exhibited at Public Works Administration, Anonymous Gallery, The FiDi Arsenale, Mery Gates, and Annka Kultys Gallery U.K. among others. Screenings include Vector Festival, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Mock Jungle, Ammerman Center for Art and Technology, and Humboldt University Berlin. Jason Isolini received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
