Rhett Bice - Biography

VJ-ing was a natural extension of the art videos I began doing in 2002. I had a long-standing fascination with interactive medias but I didn't have the means for vj-ing at the time so I began creating 10 -15 minute loops to play at events.   An artist in residence at The Ink People Center for the Arts, was looking for people to contribute to a show he was putting on. He encouraged me to make the leap from commercial production to personalized expression and the show gave me a reason and a focus for my first video installation. It was satisfying and emotionally rewarding so I have kept it up and it's evolved into vj-ing. About the same time I  I saw some video work by Kristen Miltner which was very inspiring and I felt her work validated the path I was on.  It's been a terrific process from there to here where I feel I have a well developed sense of what I like to do with video and now here is all of this new software like Resolume giving me instant feedback loops and enough choices and control to enable me to create my own unique style.

My inspirations come from the interactions of the medium itself with my desire to fetish-ize moments in time. The medium gives me a field of operation between the goal of video to realistically represent the outside world and the distortion which occurs recursively in an infinite regression. The distortion is innate in the act of representation and cannot be separated from it. The subjects are placed somewhere where in this field as I begin degrading them over and over again to bring out the desired qualities identified with the feelings caused by the original act of observation. So the more I distort the representation the more true it is to my experience of the event. The subjects of my material come as I notice certain things in my environment, i.e. the way the sun reflects off of cars moving in the distance, and they develop into a theme as I go out with my camera looking for similar types of events to capture on tape.

The entire process takes place neither completely in my head, nor in the outside world, or even in the static memory of the computer but it cannot exist without any of those, it is a virtual reality, a representation of something that is not verifiable as an actual event. It then becomes part of my visual library where it is used and manipulated repeatedly, each time as a new virtual event.

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Rhett Bice Productions - P.O. Box 1045 - Arcata, California 95518
tel 707.845.8957 or 707.826.0298 - fax 707.476.9408 - info@rhettbiceproductions.com