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EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO ARTIST MARK O'CONNELL TAKES US THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, DARKLY.
The postcard on Mark O'Connell's bedroom wall says it all: YOUR TELEVISION IS ALREADY DEAD.

Needless to say, the work of this Seattle-based avant-garde video artist covers a creative territory somewhere between the grotesquely surreal and the startlingly sublime. In Top Story Tonight, for example, O'Connell melts the talking heads of network news anchors like crayons in a postmodern media fire - all to a sound-bitten soundtrack of "news-speak" debris.

O’Connell, a former rock guitarist turned video-compositing junkie, thrives in a dark binary universe, where everything is merely a series of zeros and ones just waiting to be processed, reprocessed, and reprocessed again. Still images, archival footage, audio files, music, and text provide the eclectic inspiration for works shown at film festivals and in art galleries worldwide.

"I turned to digital video so that I could work with all of these things seamlessly," he says. "Before, you would have to have a specialist to deal with each of these elements. The film industry is a consensus thing. Art by committee. Look at the list of credits on a Hollywood movie. There isn’t really a single author. With digital video, you can have one author. It makes it a lot more personal. It’s closer to an art than a business."

Just by using the tools incorrectly, you can come up with a lot of interesting stuff.

- Mark O'Connell

While O’Connell's gritty, layered aesthetic can be compared to that of Seattle rockers Nirvana, his art has more in common with another Seattle musician, Jimi Hendrix. Just as Hendrix's pyrotechnic excursions into the unknown were the result of finding new ways to mangle the electric guitar, O'Connell's montage techniques are at once obsessive and unexpected: "Just by using the tools incorrectly you can come up with a lot of interesting stuff," he says. "I tend to work in low-resolution. It introduces a certain kind of artifact that I know how to manipulate."

O’Connell’s realization, like that of Hendrix before him, was that new mediums offer opportunities to approach art in entirely new ways. "We’re dealing with a stream of zeros and ones and that means that you can take this information and do things that were impossible before," he says. "It can be so much more than just a faster way to do what linear editing did."

The first step in O’Connell’s process is the collection of elements that will be combined into a "moving collage," in the manner of an end-of-the-century Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg worked with pictures sliced from glossy magazines and newspapers but O’Connell’s source material can come from almost anywhere - cut-up, sampled, and recontextualized as needed. O'Connell's early works, in fact, were done without a camera. O'Connell's source elements are photographed, drawn by hand, or improvised on musical instruments; others are captured by an ever-vigilant VCR or provided by a local video store that specializes in discarded celluloid. Eventually all find their way into his hard drive via an Apple® PowerMac^TM G3.

O’Connell then manipulates texture, color, and dynamics using Adobe® Photoshop® for compositing and Adobe Premiere® for cut-and-paste video editing. O’Connell resists the trap of relying on filters to produce certain effects commonly associated with experimental video. Instead, he uses the built-in filters in Adobe After Effects® - but rather than running his footage through a single filter, he’ll often use eight or nine at random, just to see what happens. "I don’t use a lot of third-party filters. They are really obvious, identifiable, and cheesy," he says.

As an auteur, O'Connell's got more in common with Fellini’s stream-of-consciousness approach to craft than with Spike Lee's manicured school of narrative. In fact, O’Connell eschews conventional storytelling entirely; his pieces strive to find new ways for the viewer to experience moving images and sound.

While experimental video has existed long before the personal computer, it is the digital realm that continues to provide new inspiration for artists like O’Connell. "What’s new is the ability to composite, the ability to work alone, and the ability to take a lot of disparate media that was traditionally isolated and bring them together in one box where it can be manipulated seamlessly," he says.

To see more of O'Connell's work, a VHS retrospective titled Dipstick is available through the Howard House Gallery (206-256-6399) and Blackchair Productions.