Tucker Grams's Portfolio for SUNY Buffalo
Ignivinduitional [Excerpt]
Single channel video 2024, 4’46”
In human knowledge, the presences implied by pronouns outgrow the frameworks that make them. A diagram, sentence, word, or image can represent a particular conception at the same time as its movement in time and space is the potential for its own deconstruction.
From My Stomach [Excerpt]
Single channel video 2024, 6’45”
Can AI be misused as an artistic tool? This video looks for limits of poetic abstraction in use of artificial intelligence image models as they are put into contact with the contingency of personal and photographic memory and the chance of the real glitch.
Wave Path [Excerpt]
Single channel video 2024, 9’05”
Wave Path understands the difference between a dialectical relationship of transcendent catastrophe and one of cyclical relationality. As a project, the path harnesses a tension between the two to ask this question: is there an other side to the habits that form us?
Absence [Documentation]
Interactive Installation 2024
MIDI Keyboard, projection, 3D models, audio files.
The music that emerges from the world never repeats itself. Here, an instrument can create a boundless variety of images, with your help. As you explore the combinations made possible by such a modular system, imagine that you participate not in the creation of a unique artwork, but in the artwork’s own modest contribution to the world’s expansive generation of poetry. I made a set of 3d scans as I moved through life and my local environment; these scans are scenes removed from their contexts so they may replicate. As they come back into the time of the world through interaction, the materials of my life make something new, generating connections between parts of experience, surviving even as they are partially dissolved in a system. While particulars of my life are reduced to opaque representations in this system, the continuous dissolution of identity is also an endless source of something sublime. I exist somewhere in the piece, but the music of absence defines it.
Search [Documentation]
Interactive Installation 2024
3D printed projector case, carved stick, miniature projector, smartphone, speakers, fabric, sticks, stone, 360° video 10’09”
Search is a device and its installation for viewing. The device holds a small projector and a smartphone playing a 360 degree video with gyroscope control. This allows the viewer to manipulate the image as they search for photographs within a swirl of abstracted images projected onto the ‘ancient’ technology of fabric and sticks. The installation asks whether contemporary technology, when imagined as a ‘tool’ and connected philosophically with its more archaic forms, could be reimagined as a part of unprecedented knowledge or ritual.
Modular Reproduction
Gum bichromate prints on watercolor paper 2024
21.5″ x 42″
Inspired by Chinese Shanshui painting as an ancient model of modularized productivity, I pushed the boundaries of alternative process photographic printing to create an expansive and poetic representation of the landscape that I inhabit.
The Marriage of Art & Life [Documentation]
Installation 2024
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Something found, something stolen, something borrowed, something broken. Something loud, something true, something awful, something you. Something bought, something painted, something wrought, something not. Something blown, something trusted, something grown, something mustered. Something fallow, something driven, something below, something given. Something scoped, something copied, something hoped, something concrete.
For this ‘found object’ installation, I used a generative process of feedback between ‘found’ objects and descriptive language in order to create a story about the consequences of art/life’s productive and destructive tendencies.
Not Something You DO Every Day [Excerpt]
Single channel video 2024, 11’09”
This video brings together extremes between fiction and experience. Spending unusually long amounts of time in a place gives me an experience unlike any other. The documents I create as I experience can’t communicate the experience, so a narrative forms, leaving some things out. Out of control, this narrative stretches images into absurd shapes, just as my mind does when I close my eyes and my eyes do when I look too long. I edit the story to remember it. I bring my memories towards the sensorial extremes of experience with the help of an artificial intelligence models.
Seed [Selection of 12]
21 Silver gelatin prints 2023, 11″x14″
From the series “Seed,” where I made overlapping exposures, double exposures, and thoughtful exposures to understand photography’s mediation of experience and the poetics of inter-image relations.
Falls [Documentation]
Interactive installation 2023-2024
MIDI Keyboard, projection, video files, audio files.
When you play an instrument, you engage with the possibilities encoded in its construction. When you view a work of art, you do the same thing. This artwork turns the surface of an image into something that a viewer/participant creates. It preserves some didactic directionality, but complicates it by turning the piece into a tool of the audience. The viewer-composed images build stories out of traces left during the disintegration of ritual practices.
Jabber [Documentation]
Interactive virtual environment 2023
Tiny eyeballs, dresses, and street signs respond to your touch, growing to overtake their environment. As objects that exist only in the virtual space between a camera and a screen, the responsive actions of these ideal images first disrupt real space. As they overtake the “real” setting captured by the camera, the tables turn and viewers’ surroundings have a chance to intrude on the “virtual” world which has populated the camera screen. Do the actions encoded in this system make us question the division between real and digital, or do they limit each to its own place?
Organized Game [Excerpt]
Single channel video 2023, 4’58”
My memory comes out of order and replaces itself. Everything I remember resists suppression. As we watch a representation of a character’s inner experience, somehow composed into an order of settings and symbols, we hear from an objective point of view. I identify with myself when I create fiction. To make this fiction like my memory, I programmatically randomized story elements, generating more impossible meaning
Old [Excerpt]
Single channel video 2023, 2’13”
An early experiment with artificial intelligence image deepfake technology, this video, humorously and critically appropriates William S. Burroughs’s writing and likeness in order to ponder the effects of ‘creative’ cultural production.