Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: 201: A Text Algorithm
June 2001
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: 201: A Text Algorithm
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s 201: A Text Algorithm presents a numbered list of rows with scrolling text describing each shot of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Behind the rows, a still from Kubrick’s film shows the protagonist, Dave, removing memory units from the AI character HAL in an effort to shut him down. The horizontal scroll of the text resembles LED displays often used in advertisements and commercial signage as it intersects with the vertical arrangement of numbered vertical bars in the movie still. Clicking on the numbers denoting the respective shot for each text row links users to the artists’ website.
By reducing the cinematic narrative to a shot list, the McCoys’ work deconstructs experimental cinema into a database of text and subliminal cues. It both investigates how individual shots generate spatial relationships and challenges conventional paradigms of time and space in moving images. The Gate Page is part of the McCoys’ series 201: A Space Algorithm, in which users are invited to view and re-edit shots from the film.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy (b. 1968; Sacramento, California; b. 1967; Seattle, Washington) create multimedia artworks that examine the genres and conventions of filmmaking, memory, and language. They are known for constructing subjective databases of narrative material and making fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements to create live cinematic events. Their work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the British Film Institute, London; Kunstverein Hannover, Germany; the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine; PKM Gallery, Beijing; the San Jose Museum of Art, California; Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; the Sundance Film Festival; and Artists Space, New York. Their work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum; MoMA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the 21C Museum Hotels; and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville. They have received a Creative Capital Award (2002), the WIRED Rave Award for Art (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011), and a Headlands Alumni Award (2014).
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.
