Baker Artist Portfolios

Painterbot.com is a site where visitors can take a personality test and "Painterbot" generates a work of art that matches their personality. This can be done from the Painterbot Kiosk or any computer connected to the internet. Visitors are categorized and their data is stored in Painterbot's database.
This piece looks at the merging of psychology and marketing. It reflects on on how psychographic marketing profiles are constructed and how they are mapped back onto the individual.

(See Project Overview "Giclee Prints on Canvas I)

Both of these video works, along with "Leaving the Ground", represent the kind of collage-based video art I was making in the late 80's and early 90's. In all three, I'm choosing to combine a range of different visual imagery along with musical sequences and performance elements in order to create essays built around specific themes.

"8 Short Processes" is a series of short video works I made in the early 1980's that focused on specific editing techniques that were available at the time. Of course, each of these sketches was produced using analog video editing equipment, and though somewhat limiting compared to today's digital editing capabilities, I still thrived on the great flexibility the medium afforded me at the time.

"Leaving The Ground" was completed in 1988 following a one year's residence in central Mexico. The video depicts the notion of human flight both as an element found in certain Mexican rituals and as a universal impulse. Sequences of air-borne humans are juxtaposed against the "grounded" context of driving in a car. The viewer perceives dream and memory excerpts traveling across the picture plane (front windshield), and these images occasionally overwhelm the driver's view, allowing possibilities of thought/flight and dream/memory to momentarily dominate.

Carol Hess choreographed "Private Property", a dance work for performance and live video, seen here in a 1995 performance at UMBC. Pamela Matthews dances, and I perform as a male performer who surveys her movements closely with a video camera. A screen on stage displays the camera's output as the camera operator becomes more and more of an intrusive presence to the dancer. At first merely watching the dancer with my camera, I later attempt to capture her essence by using the camera's freeze frame and wipe capabilities while roaming the stage.

"Barcelona Mosaics" represents an attempt to arrive at a series of rules that guided both the image gathering as well as the editing strategies I employed. I start by using all the raw, ambient audio that originally accompanied the video footage shot in the field, in this case, the existing sound from various locations I visited in Barcelona in 2008. And guiding my choice of the visual for this work, I decided to compose each and every camera shot to include a diagonal edge running between opposite corners of the frame.

AUDREY CHEN: voice/cello/electronics
www.myspace.com/audreychen

AUDREY CHEN: voice/cello/electronics
www.myspace.com/audreychen