sculpture – BENJAMIN DE KOSNIK

DPP

Concrete, moss, oil and acrylic varnish, gitter, silicon beads, inkjet on film, adhesive, glass vials, cannabis seeds from Amsterdam, Netherlands and Humbolt, California.

2020

Form for the long-term preservaton of genetic material: a personal seed vault for rare/legendary/unknown or otherwise meaningful genetics, a miniature Svalbard for a single plant.

Broken Obelisk / Visual ChangeLog

Two inkjet prints (each 18″ x 84″), momigami wrinkles, cast concrete, EMT conduit, LED lights, arduino, sensors, custom software, google drive archive. Dimensions H x L x W (8′ x 6′ x 3′).

2016

New media sculpture and advertisement for a virtual archive hosted on Google Drive. The archive includes all the reading, projects, visual reference material, and audio recordings made over a three-month period at the end of 2015. Entries to the archive were indexed by a written log, aka ChangeLog, a text file that records participation details: in this case, it includes hours consumed by participants, size of media contributed, storage location in the archive, and date.

ChangeLog Complete Text (pdf)
Light Stele / Visual ChangeLog

Tumbleweed

Tumbleweed #2 Tumbleweed #1 Tumbleweeds (Studio install)

Installation, size variable. One 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted in landscape orientation, playing a variety of animated GIFs. One, two, or three forms composed of: recycled 1 gallon black plastic pots, two hundred dried and trimmed medical cannabis stems, physical therapy foam cylinders and spheres, four flowering cannabis plants, white paint. Size variable.2015

A medical cannabis grower in Northern California gave me two enormous bales of over a hundred individual plant stems. I took these discarded remains of medical cannabis cultivation, created temporary forms, and photographed these arrangements. Then, these photographs were animated, and displayed in the background for the next version of the forms, which incorporate more and more cast-off material as the cannabis plants in the next harvest continue through their life cycle.

Light Stele / Visual ChangeLog

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VZKiXnZb0I&autoplay=0&loop=1&rel=0&w=480&h=270&showinfo=0]

Installation with double-sided inkjet prints, bends, magnets, LED light strips, arduino, sensor, controlling software, acrylic mirrors. With Barney Haynes and Michael Shiloh.

2014

Installation exploring individual versus group credit, and the position of the individual in art versus science communities. In the science world, there is an idea of a ChangeLog file, a text file hosted on the internet with minimal formatting containing a log of activity for all individual participants on a larger work, sorted by date. This is a useful reference for answering the questions: who, what, and when in the context of a collaborative work, and is mirrored in primary researcher/principal investigator and researcher credits when publishing. Applying this process idea from the sciences to art production, all production and conception work is logged for the creation of this light sculpture.

Text version of ArtChangeLog
Broken Obelisk / Visual ChangeLog

Pirate Passport

Set of 6 steel-faced copper plates with photogravure, text, vectorization, aquatint. Set of 3 prints using photogravure and aquatint. Fukui gray gampi chine-collé on Fabriano Rosaspina paper. With Emily York, Abigail De Kosnik.2011

Installation. Set of six passport-sized engraved metal plates, placed leaning up against a wall or mirror. On the wall opposite, three prints.