Blue Tower Arts Foundation

Benjamin Lotan is an artist from Southern California who works in video, performance utilzing the web, as well as drawings and photography. The music is by Philip Glass. There are so many ways you can read this piece. I was first struck by the repetitive act of stripping oneself bare. As the piece progresses the saturation of the process made me think about online activities and social networking, how we reveal ourselves to others online and how meaningless it and falsely intimate it can all seem. In this context the repetitiveness of exposing oneself becomes and blur and it’s hard to establish the “original” or real figure.  On Lotan’s website he mentions the phrase “distributed presence” in reference to another performance of his called “Lab play”. This idea that we can exist as “distributed” also stuck with me as I watched the above piece and it seems to be an element in the rest of his work. We multiply our existences. But in doing so raises the question: To whom does that original person exist? I think Lotan’s Pixel Width Portraits deal with this as well.

Another element that caught my attention from the title “Mapping a Path” is the notion of our tendencies as people to establish a route or path for our constructed selves and how it can diverge from the truth of our “real” selves- the part we keep covered. With regards to a mediated image- online or via film or photography- the picture of who we are is a construction of our own ideals. Here Lotan literally blurs the line between a mediated, constructed self and his naked, revealed self. At the climax of the piece is a confused mess of images that has no beginning, center or end. The only way out is to slow down the action and through sped-up, mechanical movement revert back to the covered/conceled self.