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Mark Callahan is the Artistic Director of Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at the University of Georgia, Associate Academic Director for Innovation in the Arts at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, and serves on the faculty of the Lamar Dodd School of Art. He is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a member of the European Honors Program in Rome, Italy.

Callahan’s work has evolved from a traditional printmaking background to experimental multimedia projects. He was commissioned to create a site-specific work for Video Culture: Three Decades of Video Art, a collaboration that joined the forces of eleven institutions in the metro Detroit area to examine video art and its impact on contemporary culture. His work has also been used in concert by R.E.M. as a large-scale video projection. He is the executive producer of AUX, an event and publication series devoted to experimental art in all forms. Internet Soul Portraits (I.S.P.) and 24 Hour Miss South Carolina are part of the Rhizome ArtBase at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Recent group exhibitions includeMemery: Imitation, Memory, and Internet Culture at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), You All Fell for My Act at MAMA: Showroom for Media and Moving Art in Rotterdam, and Game Change: Videogames as Art Medium and Inspiration at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia.

24 Hour Miss South Carolina

Project link: http://mazamedia.com/24/

In 2007, a teenage beauty pageant contestant made a thirty-second speech that became a media phenomenon, fueled by millions of views on the Internet and a brief but intense outpouring of parodies. 24 Hour Miss South Carolina appropriates directly from YouTube while paying homage to Douglas Gordon’s seminal 1993 installation, 24 Hour Psycho. Slowed, stretched, and silenced, the work repositions an object of short-lived attention and mass ridicule to an epic progression of still images. As the resonance of the original performance diminishes, 24 Hour Miss South Carolina silently plays on, carried to an obsessive extreme that invites fresh readings on the nature of celebrity, voyeurism, and entertainment.