Jason Bernagozzi is an artist whose work examines and critiques the codes embedded within the psyche of media culture. His work uses the real-time features of video and electronic media as a way to engage with interdisciplinary concepts as a dialogical system of emerging languages. He is particularly interested in the potential of non-human agents as collaborators in the artistic endeavor as a way to explore new concepts that exist outside the sphere of human assumption and logic. Bernagozzi’s work has been supported through numerous grants and awards from organizations such as the New York State Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has been exhibited nationally and internationally at exhibitions such as the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruk, Germany; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marsaille, France; the Ilman Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea and the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Jason is also a co-founder of the experimental media art non-profit organization Signal Culture. Since 2014, Signal Culture has given residencies for over 260 artists, toolmakers and researchers from 16 countries and 30 states. Bernagozzi sees Signal Culture as an extension of his practice, facilitating the opportunity to hack, program and reimagine the purpose of various technologies in a fluid, real-time studio that encourages cross disciplinary investigation and a critical relationship to mass media. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electronic Art at Colorado State University.
Dialectic
Single Channel Video, 2019
In a space between past and present, nostalgia and jargon, signal and image, Dialectic is an experimental single channel video that explores the conditions of encoded contradiction. Set in an old 1950’s gas station museum in rural Missouri, the vintage automobiles and faded mannequins are imbued with the myth of American exceptionalism. As the video moves forward, it also moves back, causing a flickering and breakdown of the video as an electronic material unable to resolve, expressing a kind of computational poetry that finds a new state in between.
