Veggie (Mordunkus)
Video, 2023
About the artwork
My new experimental short explores the mutability of identity through simple digital effects. Familiar teeth become an alien biolandscape as I manipulate the textures. Bilious green overtakes pearly white, transforming the mundane into the unexpected. As the subject bares their modified rictus grin, we re-evaluate our assumption of what appears 'normal'. The once-jarring vivid green shifts to seem not garish, but revealing in its departure from the status quo. I compel the viewer to reconsider the arbitrary societal coding of color and appearance. What decides what is aesthetically pleasing or visually disruptive? These shapes change and become cavities. By toying with culturally-constructed concepts of beauty and propriety, I hope to open space for greater appreciation of the spectrum of human appearance and identity. Even the goopy kind of folks.
Audio explanation
Listen to Mordunkus discuss this work.
If you have the tools to create any image you want, why would you just want to regurgitate the same art styles you've been force fed for your whole life? If you can tweak your output -- sometimes mathematically, as in "face minus eyes" or "goat plus eyes" -- to build something impossible in nature, why wouldn't you? Yet there are artists TODAY who make Impressionist art ("the filthy thieves with their forger's tools. No originality, so they have to steal!"). It doesn't have to be that way. A hundred years ago an Italian poet, FT Marinetti, wrote words so powerful they inspired painters and musicians. Dada poet Tristan Tzara inspired painters, sculptors, and photographers. Surrealist poet Bréton inspired all of the above plus filmmakers. Today's AI prompters are the poets of the day, using words to inspire visuals.
Mordunkus (because why not third person?) uses AI tools to bring you images unlike those you've seen before: abstract and surreal videos that often tickle your visceral sensibilities. Maybe it looks like a colonoscopy video with plants and machinery? Or is that a face? A chicken foot? Heavy on the WTF, Mordunkus does NOT Want to show you the same old thing. And almost to contradict that last sentence, the vision behind the images has been consistent over the [past two or three] years even as the tools have changed.
But is it "Art"? Marcel Duchamp answered that question already: who cares?
Negative Prompt: Signature, watermark, cartoon, face, skull, eyeball