Kelley Reception and Gallery Talk

I was pleased by the level of arbitrariness of present in Kelley's artworks. He did not appear to be too concerned with the philosophical, cultural, apparitional, or otherwise theoretical/imaginary parts of his artwork. I liked this. Most of his talk was related to breaking down the elements of the image and explaining their origins, and how he made the images (without revealing any trade secrets).

He works primarily with computers, but has an affinity for presenting artwork in non-digital formats. He has a series of digital photographs that were presented as a sequence in small books. I asked him why he did this. Couldn't he just make a .mov file with the sequence? I was pleased by his answer. He said that he gives control to the audience. The vagaries of movement, the intention of the user in flipping the pages, did not generate the same experience as a digital video file. A video file is uniform and plays the same way for everyone. Kelley empowers the user.

I think that anything is possible in the digital realm, and that with advances and new features in digital video, the experience of a unique experience for each individual user watching a sequence as a video file, will be possible. All the subtleties and control for the user will be possible eventually, so the idea that a small paper book generates a special experience unattainable with digital formats is not completely true, but I do like the idea that he considered the audience and put a lot of thought into how they would be viewing it.