| Biography: | Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are a Brooklyn,
New York-based married couple who make
art together. They work with interactive
media, film, performance and
installation to explore personal
experience in relation with new
technology, the mass media, and global
commerce. They often re-examine classic
genres and works of cinema, science
fiction or television narrative,
creating sculptural objects, net art,
robotic movies or live performance.
The McCoys met in Paris in 1990[2]. They
subsequently studied together at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York where they both received
their MFA in Electronic Art, studying in
part under Pauline Oliveros.[3]
Articles about their work have appeared
in Art in America[4], Artforum, The
Wire, dArt International, Spin Magazine,
Feed, and The Independent. They won a
Wired Magazine Rave Award, in the Art
Category for 2005.[5] Their work is held
in museum collections including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art[6], MoMA[2],
and Mudam[7]. A number of individual
collectors also own their work,
including actor Bill Paxton[8].
The McCoys were involved in academic
programs at MoMA. They live and work in
Brooklyn, New York.
In 1999, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
undertook the "World Views" residency
programme on the World Trade Center's
91st floor. From this residency, the
artists developed a series of
interventions into global capitalism.
For example, the McCoys created
web-based banner ads satirizing
corporate aesthetics and jargon. The
artists then used the Doubleclick.com
network to distribute 1 million of these
banner ads over one month, from
mid-August to mid-September 1999.
Doubleclick.com, which sponsored the
project, did not inform sites on which
the ads were displayed that they were
playing host to an artistic intervention.[1]
The McCoys are well-known for their
database pieces, in which they break
down a series of films or TV shows into
individual shots, and categorise them
according to a classification schema of
their own making. For example, the piece
'Every Shot Every Episode' (2001) was a
collection of 10,000 shots from the
Starsky and Hutch television series that
were categorised according to 278
categories such as 'every plaid', 'every
sexy outfit', 'every yellow Volkswagen'.
Shots relating to each category were
then burned to video CD and installed on
a shelf in the gallery along with a
small, specially designed video player.
More recently, the McCoys have been
creating works that use miniature
dioramas similar to model railroads or
dolls' houses. Live video cameras are
embedded in each diorama, capturing the
miniature figures and landscapes from
various angles. The resulting video
feeds are then sequenced by special
computer software which acts as the film
editor, creating a real-time animated
film sequence to be projected on the
gallery wall. In 'Soft Rains' (2003),
the McCoys recreated archetypal scenes
from cinema in this miniature form,
making references to films such as
Goldfinger, Friday the 13th, and Blue
Velvet. The 'Traffic' series (2004) were
recreations of moments from the artists'
personal histories when they had a
particular memory of viewing specific
films. For example, Traffic #1: Our
Second Date recreates the McCoys' second
date when they went to see a film by
Jean-Luc Godard at a cinema in Paris. | | | Source: | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_&_Kevin_McCoy | | | Date of source: | 2nd August 2007 |
|
| | Principal Occupation: | Artists | | Web Page: | http://www.mccoyspace.com/ | | Type: | group |
| |
