Terminal and the Center of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University are pleased to announce the launch of Bowling Rolling Pushing Tipping Trundling by Josh Hite. Hite is a recipient of a 2013 – 2014 Terminal Award. The Terminal Award is granted annually to four artists to help in the creation of new internet based artworks.
Bio
Josh Hite’s video and photo work is primarily concerned with human movement through local spaces. He is inspired by the potential for the creation of subjective pathways and the myriad results that occur when movers decidedly confront obstacles. Recent work focuses on the technological alteration of action and memory relative to the uploading of backyard behavior onto YouTube. He has collaborated on site-specific projects, dance and sound performances, and work in public space. Josh has a BA in Philosophy, an MFA in Visual Art and teaches photography and video at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and Arts Umbrella in Vancouver.
Artist Statement
Taking YouTube as source, Bowling Rolling Pushing Tipping Trundling is part of a series of works that archive, categorize, and reassemble audible human interventions into rural landscapes. Counter to memories recorded in my youth, which were silently recorded as photos onto film, shared in person and maybe doubled at Kmart, these recordings are noisy, and they are documented with the knowledge that they might be liked, linked, playlisted and commented on, by friends and strangers.
A few years ago I was alerted to Youtube’s transformation into a site primarily used for listening rather than viewing when asked by a few six and seven year olds why I would listen to music anywhere else online. Despite the overwhelming intrusion of song titles upon searches and hefty gentrification, it still remains rich with documents of humans recording audio and video of their lives.
Erving Goffman, in his 1978 essay “Response Cries,” wrote extensively on types of sounds uttered in horseplay, mishaps, and daily life. The recordings in this piece exude both audible glee and threat startles, with plenty of strain grunts preceding these selections. For Goffman, “Response cries, then, do not mark a flooding of emotion outward, but a flooding of relevance in.” These sounds complete narratives in ways that confirm for others present that what they think is happening is actually happening.
