bhasement

Join SPACE for a new site-responsive sculptural media installation by artist Tra Bouscaren, transforming and exploring trash, surveillance, and elements of toxic American culture. An installation in progress preview will be available to the public during the artist’s residency during First Friday Art Walk on June 2nd, with the full installation debuting the next week.

Bouscaren is the head of Florida State University’s digital media area and teaches courses in aesthetics and critical theory, new media history and theory, video art, video installation art and experimental drawing.

The artist states: “I’m a neo-cave painter. My work engages spectacle at the interface of waste culture and the surveillance state. Aggregating the waste materials into networks of assemblage, weave surveillance equipment into the installation such that it captures people as they move through the work. The live surveillance video feeds are combined algorithmically with test patterns, and re-deployed through a multichannel array to submerge the installation in projection. By illuminating the installation via the ‘calibrated’ image of the spectator, the work ‘checks’ the viewer in terms of the salvaged substrate upon which it is projected.”

“Pollution is in fashion today, exactly in the same way as revolution: it dominates the whole life of society, and it is represented in illusory form in the spectacle.” —Guy Debord, A Sick Planet

The residency and development of the new installation by Bouscaren is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Exhibition photo by Carolyn Wachnicki

Tra Bouscaren is a post-disciplinary artist focused on spectacle at the crossroads of waste culture and the surveillance state. He serves as Assistant Professor of Art and Digital Media ​Area Head, and Co-Director of the Expanded Media Lab at ​Florida State University. Bouscaren’s work has been featured at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Museum fur Naturkunde (Berlin), National Museum of Art (Addis Ababa), Victor I Fils (Madrid), The Wrong Biennale, Fort Mason Center for the Arts (San Francisco), San Diego Art Institute, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo), Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), Orlando Museum of Art, The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), and AC Institute (NYC). He has presented and/or published his practice-based research at MOCA Tucson, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Stony Brook University Conference on Art and Philosophy, Studies In Control Societies Journal, Ildo Lobo Center for Culture in Praia, CAA Conferences in Chicago and Los Angeles, the Rubin Center for Visual Arts and several NPR local affiliate stations. Education: PhD Candidate, Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo (ABD) MFA, Interdisciplinary Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania BA, Philosophy, Yale University, earned with Distinction