Bennett Williamson's Screenshots from The Computer Chronicles (resized and cropped) is a new body of work created specifically for the Add-Art Firefox plugin. The images are from still frames of The Computer Chronicles, a weekly public television show running from 1983-2002 produced by the College of San Mateo's KCSM-TV. Since its cancellation, nearly all the episodes have been digitized and made available for free download from the Internet Archive.
The narrative, episodic nature of The Computer Chronicles demonstrates the cultural logic of technological manifest destiny. New game graphics, faster modems, and laser discs are presented as inevitable steps towards maximized human mind power through fully immersive virtual workspaces, advanced robotics, and other emerging technologies. Computer culture today is still surrounded by this language of 'just over the horizon' progress, a phenomenon described by media artist Kevin McCoy as "the endlessly deferred march of technology vis-a-vis its grinding present day reality." With its collaged aesthetic of past computer graphics and styles, Screenshots from The Computer Chronicles (resized and cropped) contains a vision of the future that is at once dated and accurate. It is a window into the low-res past, full of the supposedly outmoded technologies that still form the kernel of our day to day computing experience. Dropped into the context of web sites in 2008, Williamson's selections remind us that the web is shiny and fast, but we've only come so far.
Bennett's LastFM page. (Bennett pictured at left, in the red jacket)
Bennett Williamson is a Brooklyn-based media artist. He graduated from NYU's Gallatin School with a B.A. in New Media and Arts Production. He curated The Great Internet Sleepover at Eyebeam and received the NYU Gallatin Dean's Award to develop a show of Internet art in the fall of 2008. He is a Virtual Research Fellow at FATLAB, a freelance audio/video producer, and DJ's under the moniker Bennett4$enate. He is a also a founding member of the Double Happiness art collective, and an agent of the Graffiti Research Lab. With these groups, his work has been shown in the MoMA, at The Sundance Film Festival, and Transitio in Mexico City, and published in the Irish Times, MSNBC.com, the Wall Street Journal Online, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and Esquire.
