Every Playboy Centerfold, The 1960's, 1970's and 1980's (normalized), 2002, digital c-print, 60 x 29 1/2" [Enlarge in New Window]

Jason Salavon: A Thousand Butterflies

We've all heard of the "butterfly effect"--a scientific term given to sensitivity in systems such as weather or economies in which a small perturbation can lead to drastic change. But how do you recreate this macro system in the space of one room?

That's the task Jason Salavon has set up for himself in the installation provisionally titled A Thousand Butterflies. One wall of a darkened room will consist of swirling light patterns that resemble both butterflies and galaxies. The other walls will contain a variety of controls, "about 250 buttons, knobs, joysticks," says the Chicago-based artist. "All of them will impinge on a three-dimensional system that relates to biology and the constellations visually."A Thousand Butterflies is, he says, "technically one of the most difficult projects I've done."

Through what Salavon terms "blind control," a viewer/participant will manipulate the different levers, with each turn, each push, having an effect on the patterns--but not in an immediate, obvious way. Change will be incremental, with the cumulative effect known only over a period of time. This precisely echoes the scientific idea alluded to in the title, that the behavior of an individual organism such as the butterfly can wind up causing significant alterations in, say, global weather patterns.

Much of Salavon's work is driven by a fascination with how the micro and macro worlds interact, and how it is possible to contemplate, as the English Romantic poet William Blake once wrote, "the world in a grain of sand." According to Salavon, who teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, the relation between the individual and the collective "has a lot to do with my work. I am interested in discrete elements of various populations interacting. How can we look at the macro without losing sense of the micro and vice versa?" The artist, who minored in computer science in college, harnesses computational technologies to process the vast amounts of information that today's individual is besieged with--whether through film, television, or the Internet--and who puzzles over how to handle these massive amounts of data.

Data manipulation is behind a technique Salavon developed for a type of digital portraiture that eliminates overt content, seen in such works as The Top Grossing Film of All Time 1 X 1. Using the film Titanic as his starting point, Salavon digitally rearranged its 336,247 frames according to each frame's predominant color, arriving at an overall abstraction that can be taken in at one glance. While he is no fan of the film (chosen by the artist for its emblematic status), he remarks that director James Cameron "has a sense of pacing and understands color more than I gave him credit for." (The film's star, Leonardo DiCaprio, purchased a print of the work).

Salavon has applied digital portraiture to other emblems of pop culture, such as MTV videos and men's magazines. In Figure I (Every Playboy Centerfold 1988-1997), all of Playboy's centerfolds from those years were digitized into their essential colors and wound up as an androgynous, blurry, golden-hued mass that may or may not be a nude woman--the hallmark signs of the female physique being obliterated. With its erasure of bodily identity, Figure I reminds its viewers of how corporate culture tends to homogenize and commodify society and, in this case, sexuality. In an interesting coda, the magazine got in touch with Salavon. He laughs, "I thought at first they were going to sue me. It turns out they wanted to buy a print." The copy now hangs at Playboy, Inc.'s headquarters in Chicago.

Commercial possibilities certainly lurk in his experimentation with computer technologies that are able to detect patterns in what is being viewed. In fact, he's had "serious conversations with people in the [film] industry." The artist understandably feels ambivalent about such a direction--it's not why he's doing this. As he works on finalizing A Thousand Butterflies, he continues to expect the unexpected. Towards that end, he aims "to combine dry scientific technique with everyday visual experiences. There's a joy in how things will look, in boundless possibilities. I want to be surprised."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Photography | Americana | 2000