‘Boxed Roomer’ 2007
‘New Talent’ profiles work by final year students in Fine Art at University of Sunderland. Michael Gardiner’s work has been selected to accompany the main gallery exhibition by Cory Arcangel. Like Arcangel, Gardiner works with new media, video and audio to create his work. He describes the image here acts as his “visual alias” for both his musical and fine art practice: it is, in effect, a “logo” or “tag” for his artistic persona. His first release on the label Cookshop is coming out in the New Year, as the act “Boxed Roomer”.
Gardiner’s work operates through reusing ‘found’ sounds and images, and through principles of repetition. His music often starts with samples, whether from films, other records, or even noises recorded on the street. His visual work also adapts ‘found’ imagery, such as old family photographs. But the image here is re-used in another way: it “repeats” his own “logo”, which features elsewhere throughout his oeuvre, on record labels for example. Like Arcangel, his work complicates the question of authorship: he makes creative use of other peoples’ sonic and visual output to build a new artistic world. The image here is a computer-generated design which has been photographed on-screen using a ‘macro’ lens. The colours of the design are not from any object in the real world, but of the red, green, and blue light which create colour combinations on a computer screen. Gardiner is interested in “reuse and distortion” of new and old technologies across both sonic and visual media. He notes, “the computer has become my paintbrush”: this image shows, in effect, “the tools of my trade”.
