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Rist studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna, through 1986. She later studied video at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. In 1997 her work has been featured in the Venice Biennial for the first time, where she was prized with the Premio 2000. 1988 through 1994 she was member of the music band and performance group Les Reines Prochaines. In 2002 she was invited by Professor Paul McCarthy to teach at UCLA. Pipilotti Rist currently lives with her common law partner Balz Roth, with whom she has a son, Himalaya.
During her studies Pipilotti Rist started to make super 8 films. Her works last generally only a couple of minutes, and altered in their colors, speed, and sound. Her works generally treat issues related to gender, sexuality, and the human body.

Rist, contrasts many other conceptual artists who work in the field of film, her color-rich and musically saturated works transmit a sense of happiness and simplicity. She was initially bumped in with the feminist genre, but has transcended the field on several occasions. I feel aroused sensually and playfully as I watch her videos. She seems to delicately and repeatedly massages my mind with this character of gentleness and vulnerability. Absurdity, in her context, is played and weaved in to a surreal dreamlike aura, which certainly contrasts confusion.

Bill Viola. Are you watching?

Bill Viola is considered a pioneer of video art and is internationally established as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as pious traditions. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.

Viola has built an evident regime of influence in video, as would be expected from a pioneer of the art form. His pieces build to become total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound. They employ state-of-the-art technologies and are notable by their precision and simplicity. For me, simplicity is king. I appreciate his works mostly because of his utilization of elemental ideas which reflect grand and holy ideas as a god might be assumed to be translated as. The movement and flow he utilizes to transfix his viewers transcends their knowledge of just how involved they are. Souls are entangled.

Mathew Barney ...preview

Matthew Barney was a San Francisco child born in 1967 and raised in Boise. He attended Yale where he received his BA in 1989, then moved to New York City, which is his permanent residence to this day. From his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that includes feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing. In his first solo exhibitions, Barney presented elaborate sculptural installations that included videos of himself interacting with various constructed objects and performing physical feats such as climbing across the gallery ceiling suspended from titanium ice screws. In 1992, Barney introduced fantastical creatures into his work, a gesture that presaged the vocabulary of his subsequent narrative films. In 1994, Barney began work on his epic Cremaster cycle, a five-part film project accompanied by related sculptures, photographs, and drawings. He completed the cycle in 2002. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum of artwork from the entire project, premiered at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in June 2002 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in October 2002 before its presentation in New York.

His bold and outrageous characteristics transcend what most would consider shock art, for me at least. His modeling past is incredibly evident as he controls the lens to bring the absurdity of life’s experience straight to your consciousness. Emotion must be what he hopes to evoke, but as I follow the plots of his shorts I find myself consumed by intrigue and the mask of the critiquing who cannot watch without bias.

Oh my freak!

I'm about postal at this point.
This flash project seems to want nothing more than division.
Ugh.

what YOU want to hear.