Viral Painting, 2011
Michael Stoltz

This video is from a one night installation in UTSA's new media lab. Every monitor in the room was playing this video. As the title implies, the project imagines what a computer virus could look like. The video was created by changing the compression type of an appropriated video sequence several times and then edited in Final Cut Pro. This abstract aesthetic is very different from previous work in my portfolio. In the past my work has consisted of mostly autobiography. I wanted to make something that was just pleasing to look at and had nothing to do with me. As the visual information became more and more corrupted by the process I began to see a parallel between what was happening to the video information and what would happen to the information on a hard drive that was infected with a virus. This also solved the problem of presentation. When creating the video I hadn't yet thought of a way to present it. A single channel presentation didn't have the impact I was looking for and I couldn't think of an installation that would be relevant to the subject matter. The idea of the visual virus brought the piece together as a whole. In the future I would like to create more installations that appear to be mistakes that have taken over a space or disasters that have destroyed a space while utilizing this glitch aesthetic.