“Technology is never subtle,” Jennifer McCoy explained during my Monday morning Video Installation class. Before that class, I thought that, typically, artists who included technology in their installations would want to hide all the cameras and switches and wires, as if they were mistakes that needed to be covered up in order for the final product to be aesthetically pleasing. Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, however, do just the opposite. On Monday, The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology hosted the McCoys of New York City (Jennifer McCoy is an art professor at Brooklyn College, and Kevin McCoy at New York University) to lecture on their work as part of the New Media Colloquia Series. Their work, according to the McCoys themselves, includes aspects from cinematic filmmaking, language and human memory. Besides speaking in front of a large student and faculty audience, the McCoys worked with students in the Video Installation class, including myself; this was a rare treat and an immensely rewarding experience. The lecture was equally interesting and enjoyable, and the McCoys brought their art even more to life by sharing their personal interpretations of their work and the background of how they came to be.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are both a couple and a collaborative team, which can be seen in the two-sided nature of many of their pieces. Reflections on past events contained both Kevin and Jennifer’s takes (often running parallel to one another), and one specific piece, Our Second Date is literally what the title implies: a look at their second date. In keeping with their cinematic interests, the McCoys recreated in miniature a scene from the movie they saw on their second date together, and next to the small replica was a model man and woman watching it on a cinema screen. An automated camera rotates around the remake of the scene, and is transferred live on to the smaller screen that the couple watches. Jennifer described the piece as “[collapsing] time,” and that idea definitely rings true, as the viewers are constantly shifting their eyes between the moving camera and what is playing on the screen. What the rotating camera sees in the model version plays directly on the smaller screen, and one of the models is looking over their shoulder, watching the entire scene unfold.
Another interesting piece the McCoys discussed at length was High Seas, in which a New York City museum with an excess of model boats asked the McCoys and other NYC artists to do something — anything — with the boats in the basement of the museum. Just as in Our Second Date and in many of the McCoys’s other pieces, technology takes center stage. They aren’t afraid of the impact a moving camera will have on a piece, and instead embrace it wholeheartedly. The McCoys placed the boat in the center of a specially designed wooden brace (it almost resembles a dry dock) with a wavy wooden track around the edges. A camera traces these edges, and the video is fed live to a projection on the wall. Because of the wavy track, the video image is wavy as well, giving motion to the otherwise still boat. There is no sound in this piece, unless you include the squeaking that the camera makes as it moves up and down the wavy track. Even that, though, is embraced by the McCoys as merely what comes along when you mix technology and art.
In their art, the McCoys have found just the right balance between art and technology; movement and stability; large and small; and past and present. Their lecture Monday night was both fascinating and funny, and will hopefully excite even more students and faculty to attend lectures in the Colloquia Series, and maybe even attempt to view digital media in a more personal and poignant way.
