"Primitive" - artist's statment

“Primitive”
Investigating data visualization
Taylor Zorzi

The compulsion to separate yourself from everyday life seems to be a pursuit that most humans share. As an escapist society, we seem to turn towards cinema with a thirst for sexuality and violence. Thus distilling ourselves, if only for a moment, to our most primitive desires. The question isn't “how do I show violence?” but rather “how do I show the spectator his position vis-à-vis violence and its representation?”(Michael Haneke). Inspired by such artist’s work as Haneke’s Funny Games and Nicholas Di Genova’s Children of Poseidon I created a piece with intentions of directly reveling the demand in place for excessive sexuality and violence in cinema created by the viewers lust for these particular themes. Hanke’s Funny Games, an important film in cinematic history because it shows that as an audience we have been accustomed to cinema with very dark undertones and in doing this we have been desensitized to the nature of the acts. Haneke writes with the intent to place feelings of guilt onto the viewer for being attracted to this type of movie. He believes that we foolishly fail to recall the fact that these acts are not only taking place within the limitations of the cinema screen. Nicholas Di Genova’s Children of Poseidon are a group of creatures generated in post apocalyptic time. His creatures have changed roles and taken on new identities and in turn new body parts to survive in a new world. I needed to find the best way to organize and visualize data in such a way that the quantity and intensity of the particular themes in cinema I was intending to investigate are clear, and Genova’s detailed intricate hybridizations, assisted in directing the aesthetics in visualization for this assignment. I created a visual representation of eight actor’s careers. A legend along the side of each print allows the viewer to decipher the tone and direction of each actor’s career based on hybrid visualization. There are specific categories and a scale system to visualize the frequency and intensity of each string of data that I am representing. To emphasis the primal enthusiasm that manifests itself in the viewer when watching violent and sexual cinema I created a hybrid similar to the centaur, as a representation of a human with animalistic characteristics.


As a site for data collection I chose to compile facts from IMDB, or the Internet Movie Database. As IMDB allows for specific keyword searches applicable to acting careers rather than information only specific to a single movie it was possible to search for keywords related specifically to violence and sexuality over the duration of that specific actor’s portfolio. After accumulating a large amount of data proceeding sifting through the plethora of information that IMDB provides for the avid film viewer, I narrowed down the data. I chose eight actors, four females; Holly Hunter, Jodi Foster, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis and four males; Viggo Mortensen, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sylvester Stallone, that according to IMDB acted in the greatest number of films that had the greatest number of violent and sexual keywords in their description. Those keywords, being eight out of the thousands of possible keywords on IMDB that I chose based on the fact that they were the most predominant in those eight actors’ careers; gore, murder, blood, death, female nudity, violence, vulgarity and sex. To visualize these actors’ careers as ones that contained a large amount of sexual and violent content I attributed the descriptive keywords to an animal, demonstrating the savage, unrefined characteristics of an actor invoking such behavior.


As an artist who typically works with installations, performance or video as platforms for creation, I initially wanted to investigate something quite new and create digital imagery generated using the programming language, processing. Processing would have been able to filter data from IMDB, do all of the data collection and fabricate the hybrid all on it’s own with a few clicks of a mouse from the viewer. Yet to do the program using processing, writing the code to analyze the data from IMDB did not only prove to be difficult, but realistically it allowed for far too much of a chance aspect. I wanted control of the visualization and putting this control into the hands of the viewer didn’t allow for the specific aesthetic or even commentary that I wanted to surround the piece take place. Allowing the viewer to have some sense of control once again let the viewer integrate themselves into this world of sexuality and violence instead of segregating the work from the viewer and really introducing the piece to them from an outside point of view. With this said, the medium changed. I decided to create eight individual prints, using stencils and spray paint, giving me, as the artist freedom to arrange the hybrid, as I truly wanted it to appear to the viewer.