The Club

The Club is a moving-image digital collaging of 57 images of selected North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths from the eighties till the present. There's also a linked slideshow of some stills from the video.

The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO's who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.

So it's a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others' deformities.

Here's what Andy Warhole said about The Club: "they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are -- this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies... but not them -- this is new -- and of course i love your politics :) "

Much of the work I've done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There's other work I've done with dbCinema here.


3 Responses to “The Club”

  • gregorious: May 4, 2011 at 6:05 pm

    Hypnotic, disturbing, disorienting — can’t take my eyes off the mutations. Jim, I strongly urge you stay on this direction, develop a “famiy” of such mutations, and then propose an installation within a major museum, or gallery.

  • Jim Andrews: May 8, 2011 at 12:35 pm

    Thanks, Gregory. I think what I’ll probably do next is a piece that’s formally similar to The Club in that it will consist of both a video and a slidvid. Previously I’ve just been doing slidvids. But the video is quite different from the slidvid (stills).

    And it will be on hockey goalies. I’ve been collecting photos of goalies such as http://sportscrap.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/sawchuckscarface1.gif (Terry Sawchuk). And photos of their masks. And photos of them playing. I can sort of see a piece where the middle of the screen uses a brush that concentrates on faces and masks. And the periphery contains smaller images of them playing and so on.

    What sort of direction are you thinking of? What other sorts of ‘family members’ come to mind to you?

  • gregorious: May 9, 2011 at 10:54 am

    Goalies! Excellent. Other families: it would be intriguing to observe the modulations within the so called “global finance community”. Pop icons would be another potentially illuminating target — for that one, you would definitely need an audio mashtrack, at very low volume, more as a bug than a beat.