Andrew Super

     
Andrew Super
University of Wales, Newport
andrew.g.super@gmail.com
www.andrewsuper.com


Biography

Andrew Super is an American artist living in Bristol, England, working primarily with photographic media and print. His current work deals with notions of perception and time, specifically using image making to compress time, creating avenues for seeing that would be impossible without mediation.
Andrew teaches at the Institute for Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Bath, and received a BFA in Studio Art from Pittsburg State University and an MFA in Imaging Arts and Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Photography at the University of Wales, Newport.

Illustrated Talk

Romanticising YouTube: Digital Sublimity Through Print
(Non)Graphic Images of Violence examines the role of the print artist as an explorer in the digital landscape, specifically the video centric realm of YouTube and LiveLeaks. Romantic artists, rebelling against the increased rationalisation of the natural world in the wake of the industrial revolution, took it upon themselves to search for the sublime in the world around them. This project similarly seeks to physically depict the ineffable, by taking amateur videos that have been democratised through media coverage and subsequently affixed to popular history on the web, and compressing the content into singular images. When the temporal grounding of the videos is removed, the combined images become abstracted colour fields open to independent interpretation by a viewer. The source content of nearly all the images is generally referred to as ‘graphic’ in the sense of the depiction of abject violence. However, as the resulting prints are particularly non-representational, the viewer is forced to explore the images ahistorically. Once printed, the images become aesthetic objects bereft of the meaning of their origins, subsequently crossing over from the realm of the terrifying into that of the tranquilising. This project presents multiple lines of question and inquiry concerning intersections between mediums (print and video), the work of art in the age of digital production (further digitising digital media to create digital prints), and art historical traditions (the exploration of neo-Neo-Romanticism). This project has been developed in association with CFPR Editions, part of the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England.