Jesse Chart discusses his television art practice

Video A character and project created in late 2019 by Australian artist, video producer and director Jesse Chard, created through the isolation he endured during the COVID-19 lockdown. It serves as a secondary identity for the artist, who used the massive influx of free time in social isolation to create and broadcast a mix of queer video clips and music videos; It was, he describes, „like a mutilated version of MTV. YouTube and Facebook, he says, didn’t like these broadcasts and would leave me disappointed in the middle of the show, so I had to come up with new ways to package and organize the material for the show.” In his frustration, he expanded the project by creating series. Videocracy, he calls STIR, „a short-burst, micro-format curatorial show.” The series compiles nearly 20 fascinating pieces of video art from creators of experimental and avant-garde video artists from around the world, which the artist will mix with archive and historical broadcast material and then develop into a creative edit. Video sites were interested in these uploads, so Chard made more. He says, „These pieces were complex to make, but more satisfying to put together than long-form shows. They also served as a vehicle to connect with individual creators around the world, and I have developed many friendships with them. It’s been a real blessing.”

The digital artist discusses the evolution of his work, “In 2021, during a short pause in lockdown, I was able to hold my first public performance in Sydney. Video, and test both my own original content and curatorial presentations in a live setting. As the format evolved and lockdowns eased, I was able to do more and more live shows, including sets at festivals. Later, the artist was given access to early models of the Doll-E 2 film-making tool that uses artificial intelligence, and immediately began creating a variety of micro-films using the Doll-E as raw material. He individually spliced ​​together hundreds of these film frames to create visually intense video loops that are now part of a larger hybrid cross-media performance. A televised memory of a lost futureIt debuted in Sydney on May 31, 2023.

Chard comes from a background in audio post-production, composition, sound design and documentary filmmaking. Prior to his current incarnation, he studied at both SAE and Metro Screen in Australia. Besides his work Video, is a documentary filmmaker and media producer and the founder of Creative Rituals, a media production and education service in Sydney. As with his professional pursuits, the artist is not content to dabble in chaos, and tells STIR, „During my experiments with other types of visual art creation tools, I began making physical metal visual print plates to spark my interest in static, large-format visual images.” Chard’s experiments led him to create a series of visual arts Cyberdelic Escape from Self-Reflective Goblin Cossacks, of which, as of the writing of this article, he has completed seven iterations. He continues, „In this series, I’m using the out-painting tool in Doll-E2, along with a suite of outdoor visual tools, to create works that use thousands and thousands of retrogrades as raw material.” He calls these artworks „cyberdelic” in nature and form, as they draw from the computational aspect of the image-making process, as well as the cybernetic process of the process itself. „Cyber” comes from the Greek word „kybernetikos” which means „to guide” or „to navigate”. As the artist explains, the generation of this work is a navigation, and is primarily determined by the relationship or „conversation” he has with the machine learning system.

The focus on artist participation is an interesting lens through which to view AI-driven digital art practices, and makes one wonder if most of Chard’s peers are really going far enough. As intelligent creative technology proliferates, digital crafters like him may find themselves in a race of sorts; Every artist strives to realize a bold key means of standing out from the crowd, be it in the production process or presentation form. As for Chart, it’s likely to be his body Cyberdelic Escape Cont. He says, „I have high-quality dye-sublimated works in large format Cromaluxe aluminum, fully edited to a set of technical and dimensional specifications. These works are not really designed to be viewed on computers or phones. They are meant to be blown up on walls in the physical world, and that’s the ultimate visual form, outside of the interface. and away from the distracting psychological devices embedded in technology.

The artist points out an interesting aspect of AI-driven art that is often overlooked. He says, „The responses from the machine inform my own psychology, and cause me to have intuitive or emotional reactions to what is presented.” This leads his ideas in further new directions, creating a kind of feedback, he views his art as a meditative visual tool that allows the viewer to absorb their soul into the creations, prompting consideration of human and mechanical dynamics. In this process, the chart becomes a sort of temporary point, facilitating the transference of the soul.

For now, Chard is trying to navigate the art-funding world, which he tells STIR is challenging, especially considering he falls under the broad and loosely defined realm of what he calls „outsider art.” „However,” he says, „if I can get better at showing the pieces of the puzzle in an exhibition format, I believe I can easily move on to doing important deals.” „So if I can go to international places and reinterpret their lost media in a hauntological fashion, it will be an interesting anthropological experiment!” adds the artist.

Finally, Chard is excited to meet his fellow artists currently working on the fringes of digital practices, and looks forward to the creative possibilities that arise from fostering the culture of collaboration that is becoming commonplace in the scene.