Paper Rad

Last updated

Screenshot from Paper Rad's Facemaker video (2005). Paper rad facemaker still.jpg
Screenshot from Paper Rad's Facemaker video (2005).

Paper Rad was an art collective from approx. 2000 until 2008, based on the East Coast in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Providence, Rhode Island in the United States. [1] [2] Known for creating comics, zines, video art, net art, MIDI files, paintings, installations, and music with a distinct "lo-fi" aesthetic often associated with underground culture or 1990s "retro tech", juxtaposed images and featuring bright colors.

Contents

History

The three primary members were Jacob Ciocci, [3] Jessica Ciocci, [3] and Ben Jones, [4] but additionally included many others such as Paul Bright, David Wightman, Sonja Radovancevic, Extreme Animals, and others. [1] [5] [6]

Prior to Paper Rad, Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues (C.F.) were students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and created a zine project called "Paper Radio". [7] [8] Jacob and his sister Jessica became active in Paper Rad after moving to Boston and hanging out with Joe Grillo, Ben Jones, and Christopher Forgues. [8] All of them were interested in zine making, experimental art and music, and computers, which opened up the possibility of multimedia work. [8] The first Paper Rad animation video was made in Boston on VHS tape. [8] The early collaborators for Paper Rad included Andrew Warren, Joe Grillo, Laura Grant, and Billy Grant (and later the Grant siblings with Joe Grillo formed the art collective, Dearraindrop). [8]

Paper Rad exhibited works at several major galleries including PaceWildenstein, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Deitch Projects.[ citation needed ] Paper Rad's work (featuring Ben Jones) is included in the permanent museum collection at Princeton University Art Museum. [9]

The collective published a book in late-2005, Paper Rad, BJ and da Dogs [10] and a DVD in 2006 on Load Records ( Trash Talking ). Paper Rad's video works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. [11]

Style

Paper Rad calls its style "Dogman 99", a play on the Danish filmmaking movement Dogme 95. [12] According to one of its project websites, the rules of Dogman 99 are: "No Wacom tablet, no scanning, pure RGB colors only, only fake tweening, and as many alpha tricks as possible". [12]

Paper Rad's visual projects often employ bright fluorescent palettes juxtaposed with primary colors to create a distinctive "lo fi" look. It adopts a variety of techniques and elements to achieve this look, including pop art, collage, punk art, as well as imagery from popular culture. The multimedia projects incorporate MIDI audio, poor recordings of original sound effects and voices, pixelization, and other crude audio and visual components. Paper Rad recycled or appropriated obscure sounds and images from a variety of sources, including old cartoons, commercials, and late-night television.

In the early 2000s Paper Rad's website featured early GIF art as well as a maze of linked images in the "Dogman 99" style. [12]

Collaborations & other works

Super Mario Bros. Movie

Paper Rad collaborated with multi-media artist Cory Arcangel to make Super Mario Bros. Movie, a 15-minute video piece about the life and times of Nintendo's Mario. [13] The piece consisted of a hacked Nintendo Entertainment System video-game cartridge where the backgrounds and scenarios were altered and rearranged into a narrative story about the game world becoming corrupted and Mario's existential crises about being a video game character. [13] [14] The movie debuted at Deitch Projects in New York in 2005. [14]

Wyld File

Wyld File consisted of the duo Ben Jones and Jacob Ciocci, in collaboration with Eric Mast (better known as E*ROCK). [15] Wyld File is a commercial entity that makes lo-fi music videos for artists like Islands, The Gossip ("Standing in the Way of Control"), and Beck ("Gameboy Homeboy"). [16]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cory Arcangel</span> Post-conceptual New York artist

Cory Arcangel is an American post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is best known.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dearraindrop</span>

Dearraindrop is an artist collective based in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Dearraindrop incorporates diverse disciplines that work together to create multifaceted sculptures and installations. Part of the collective's operating philosophy is modeled on the idea that our greatest human capability is the ability to work together to achieve a greater goal. Dearraindrop work incorporates painting, collage, video, large-scale, interactive installation pieces, and hand-fabricated musical instruments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swoon (artist)</span> American graffiti artist

Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is an American contemporary artist who works with printmaking, sculpture, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as one of the first women street artists to gain international recognition. Her work centers the transformative capacity of art as a catalyst for healing within communities experiencing crisis.

Bec Stupak Diop is an American video and performance artist and creative director. Her work uses collage, repetition and shifting fields of bright color to create psychedelic animations and films.

PictureBox was an art, music, photography, and comics publishing company based in Brooklyn, New York directed by Dan Nadel. PictureBox published its own books and packages books and concepts for museums and galleries. The company began in 2002 with The Ganzfeld 2 and gradually shifted to emphasize a diverse assortment of visual ideas and topics. PictureBox was best known for its books by artists from or related to the Providence art scene of the 2000s, music books, and projects for numerous artists involved with the New York gallery Canada. The cover art for Wilco's A Ghost Is Born, designed by Peter Buchanan-Smith and Nadel, won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in 2005.

Jacob Ciocci is an American visual artist, performance artist, musician, and professor. Along with sister Jessica Ciocci and friend Ben Jones, he was one of the three founding members of Paper Rad, an artist collective active from 2000 until 2008. He performs and tours regularly with drummer David Wightman in the band "Extreme Animals". As of 2015, he is based in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University</span> Contemporary art gallery in Pennsylvania, US

The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University is the contemporary art gallery of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Forgues</span> American novelist

Christopher "Chris" Forgues,, is an artist and musician, best known for his graphic novel serial Powr Mastrs. He is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

The Problem Solverz is an American animated television series created by Ben Jones for Cartoon Network. It follows Alfe, Roba, and Horace; a group of detectives in their troubled town, Farboro.

Triple Canopy is a New York-based "magazine" and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Issues of the "magazine" are published online over the course of several months. Each issue focuses on specific questions and areas of concern, and features works of art and literature, conversations, performances, exhibitions, and books. Triple Canopy is dedicated to “sustained inquiry, careful reading and viewing, resisting and expanding the present.” In “The Binder and the Server,” a memoir-manifesto published in 2010, the editors proclaimed their intention to “slow down the internet”; subsequently, reflecting on the erosion of the line between “online” and “offline,” they shifted to “slow down the world.” Triple Canopy is certified by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Triple Canopy’s archive was acquired by the Fales Library and Special Collection at New York University.

Benjamin Queair Jones is an American artist, animator, filmmaker, and voice actor. He was a co-founder and member of the art collective Paper Rad from 2001 to 2008, as well as his own studio Ben Jones Studio, Inc. in 2008. He has worked on various animated television programs and web series for Animation Domination High-Def (ADHD). Since 2017, Jones is the creative director of Bento Box Entertainment. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Junc Gallery</span> Contemporary art gallery based in Los Angeles

Junc Gallery exhibited contemporary art influenced by illustration and related genres. As such it showed work by artists early in their exhibition history including: Ben Jones, Eddie Martinez, Futurefarmers, Justin Wood, Brendan Monroe.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a resource for video and media art. An advocate of media art and artists since 1971, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists. EAI has supported the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.

Jessica Ciocci is an American artist working in a range of mediums including animation and video, Twitter, crafting, digital online projects, comics, mixtapes, performance, painting, drawing and sculpture.

<i>Stone Quackers</i> American TV series or program

Stone Quackers is an American adult animated television series created by Ben Jones. The series premiered October 27, 2014 on FXX as part of their Animation Domination High-Def block.

<i>Library of the Printed Web</i> Physical archive

Library of the Printed Web is a physical archive devoted to web-to-print artists’ books, zines and other printout matter. Founded by Paul Soulellis in 2013, the collection was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art Library in January 2017. The project has been described as "web culture articulated as printed artifact," an "archive of archives," characterized as an "accumulation of accumulations," much of it printed on demand. Techniques for appropriating web content used by artists in the collection include grabbing, hunting, scraping and performing, detailed by Soulellis in "Search, Compile, Publish," and later referenced by Alessandro Ludovico.

Ara Peterson is an American visual artist. He is known for his music-based films as well as interlaced relief paintings and sculptures, which are rooted in wave patterns and a process-intensive work ethic. Peterson was a founding member of the art collective Forcefield and is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

8-Ball Community is a New York City-based artist collective that operates a zine library, online radio station, and online public-access television station.

Joe Grillo is an American visual artist based in Virginia Beach, VA. He was briefly a member of the artist collective Paper Rad, before splintering off to found the artist collective Dearraindrop with siblings Laura Grant and Billy Grant in 2003. His graphic work was published in the underground comics newspaper Paper Rodeo and Kramers Ergot. He has exhibited internationally as a solo artist at Nordiska Akvarellmuseet Museum in Skarhamn, Loyal Gallery in Sweden, and The Hole in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Kartalopoulos</span> American comics critic (born 1975)

Bill Kartalopoulos is a New York-based comics critic, educator, curator and editor. From 2014 to 2019 he was the Series Editor for the Best American Comics series of annual comics anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He was a co-founder of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and has also directed programming for the Small Press Expo and the MoCCA Festival. He teaches courses about comics at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts.

References

  1. 1 2 Chiaverina, John (September 16, 2015). "Paul's Pile Of Papers: Paul Bright On His Paper Rad Collection And Forthcoming Book". ARTnews. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  2. ↑ Nadel, Dan (2011). "Artistic Modern Funnies: Ben Jones' Problem Solverz". The Comics Journal. Retrieved April 18, 2019. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and in Boston linked up with C.F. and collaborated as "Paper Radio"; then he formed the collective Paper Rad with Jessica and Jacob Ciocci in 2000,
  3. 1 2 "Gold Finger". www.artforum.com. Retrieved April 18, 2019.
  4. ↑ Miranda, Carolina A. (August 21, 2015). "Datebook: The art of a comics legend, avant-garde film and the future of L.A. architecture". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved April 18, 2019.
  5. ↑ "Watch Influential Noise Outfit Extreme Animals' Insane New Video For "God Jam (Blow Your Pants Off)"". Paper Magazine. July 28, 2016. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  6. ↑ "Moore College presents Women in Animation Film Festival". Metro US. March 14, 2017. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  7. ↑ Nadel, Dan (April 28, 2016). "Punk and Hippie". Art in America. Retrieved April 18, 2019.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 "An Oasis, a Utopia, and a Nightmare". Rhizome. August 14, 2018. Retrieved April 18, 2019.
  9. ↑ "Collection: Diamond (2004)". Princeton University Art Museum. Retrieved April 17, 2019.
  10. ↑ "Quimby's Store". www.quimbys.com. Retrieved September 9, 2016.
  11. ↑ "Electronic Arts Intermix: Paper Rad". Eai.org. Retrieved September 9, 2016.
  12. 1 2 3 "A Brief History of Animated GIF Art, Part One". Artnet News. August 2, 2014. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  13. 1 2 "Cory Arcangel's Surrealist Super Mario". Hyperallergic. May 10, 2011. Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  14. 1 2 Smith, Roberta (February 4, 2005). "Art in Review; Cory Arcangel; Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved October 30, 2017.
  15. ↑ "E*Rock". E--rock.com. Retrieved September 9, 2016.
  16. ↑ Womack, David; Heller, Steven (2011). Becoming a Digital Designer: A Guide to Careers in Web, Video, Broadcast, Game and Animation Design. John Wiley & Sons. p. 37. ISBN   978-1118034217.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.