(production stills - click to enlarge)

Slurb (6 minute excerpt - click to launch in new window)

 

installation view, © CharlieSamuels.com 2009

 

Description

The animated, carnivalesque tailgate party of Slurb loops and stutters like a vinyl record stuck in a groove. Slurb - a word that collapses "slum" and "suburb" - encapsulates a dreamy ode to the rise of slime, a watery future in which jellyfish have dominion.

There is a history of satirical illustration, epitomized by J.J.Grandville in the 19th century, in which animal-headed humans are deployed in the telling of troubling social narratives. Slurb is that kind of cartoon. Facts of the ocean's radical changes in acidity and oxygen levels form the backbone of the animation; overfishing, dumping, and climate change's heating of ocean currents have already triggered a reversion toward a primordial sea in parts of the ocean larger than the state of Texas. Slurb's surface is inspired by fictions, like J.G. Ballard's prescient 1962 novel Drowned World, in which inhabitants of a flooded world feel the tug of the sun, and dream of a return to their amniotic past.

Exhibition History

2009: Lights on Tampa Biennial Festival (Commission), Tampa, Florida
2009: Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York
2009: SIGGRAPH Asia, Yokahama, Japan
2010: Shortlist, Future Everything Award
2010: Tempestad, Yaku Museum, Quito, Ecuador
2010: Bennington College, Usdan Gallery
2010: The Nature of Cities, United Nations Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo, (Art Works for Change)
2010: Women and their Work, Austin, TX
2010: We Write This To You From The Distant Future, Digital Art @ Google / The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum, New York
2011: Legion Arts, Cedar Rapids, IA
2011: Friends, Enemies, and Others, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
2011: NARRACJE - Installations and Interventions in Public Space,I Gdańsk, Poland