On Flickr you find some images of Nullsleep Data Spills show.
Fabio Paris Art Gallery is proud to present the first solo show of the New York based artist and musician Jeremiah Johnson aka Nullsleep. The exhibition focuses on a number of recent works that look at the aesthetic and semantic potential of software glitches, deliberately produced by the artist in his exhaustive exploration of old gaming platforms, the legendary Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in particular.
Like Italo Calvino, Nullsleep is convinced that «Perfection deserves no interest at all and the true nature of things is revealed only in disintegration». In Data Spills (2009), this interest in subverting the artistic medium references one of its most famous predecessors: Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas. By lacerating the canvas, Fontana inserted it into the space-time continuum, and revealed the limitations of the idea of art as representation, showing how the surface is an obstacle to our full perception of space. In the same way, Nullsleep “wounds” old videogame cartridges, causing data to “spill” out. Liberated from the boundaries of the game, the data flows onto the screen, free and proud of its own abstract beauty. In technical terms, what Nullsleep does is intervene on the programme, making the graphics – the surface part of the game – interfere with the code of the programme – the underlying layer. The consequence of this is that the NES interprets the data as if it were graphics. This broken toy invites the spectator to find his or her own path through the fragments of the original story and the interferences introduced by the artist and generated at random.
In BBB CHR BOX (2009) the artist appropriates part of the graphics of another NES videogame (Bubble Bath Babes, 1991), presenting them on a series of laser-cut cardboard sheets. Here the original game – a sort of Tetris where the player has to arrange the bubbles created by an alluring topless beauty – is transformed into a refined exploration of the Modernist fascination with the grid and its electronic counterpart (the pixel). The use of cardboard reveals a taste for poor materials and an interest in recycling, which is also evident in that artist’s manipulation of obsolete technologies.
Jeremiah Johnson aka Nullsleep (www.nullsleep.com) is an electronic musician and key exponent of the American 8bit scene, which revolves around the sounds produced by modified old game platforms. In 1999 he co-founded the community 8bitpeoples, and since 2006 he is one of the organizers of Blip Festival, New York.
