About

Bio

Eric Barry Drasin is a research-based artist exploring the relationship between art and systems of value. Through emerging blockchain technologies, his current research explores digital or “distributed” processes, objects, and organizations and that problematize and reprogram fundamental assumptions about how value is constructed and disseminated.

Using contracts and legal frameworks as platform for enacting collectivity, cooperation and utopian absurdity is injected into systems designed to consolidate power. One of the vehicles for this is the technology startup. In this way, by embodying the technology startup and realizing it as a sculptural art object, the work serves to “disrupt” the forces of disruption and subvert the biases of digital capitalism.

Eric’s work is rooted in media ecology and performance. Using experimental media techniques and custom software systems, his performances and installations have explored how media can transform relationship. Sound and video is often projected into the environment creating immersive and interactive experiences. Groups of creative technologists will often perform together, utilizing scores as speculative models of utopian space.

Additionally, Eric has performed nationally using custom interactive audiovisual systems.

His recent project, Diggers, is a series of expanded video scores about failed cybernetic utopias. Through the use of networked media, aleatoric score, and performative feedback, Realtime media is contextualized as an interdependent and fluctuating psychic space; an extension bridging interior and exterior awareness. In this way, the mediated relationship between self and other can be sculpted through signal processing.

Eric founded a video art collective called the Fast Food Collective in 2012, and has been curating realtime media performances in NYC since 2013. He has worked as a curator through Culturehub/LaMama, Outpost Artists Resources, and other spaces in NYC. In 2016, he co-founded Moving Pictures Gallery, a platform for digital art. In 2017, he founded and produced the Confetti Machine Realtime Media Festival.

Statement

My work as an artist, curator and creative technologist deals with the hyper-fluidity of media and the way it transforms relationships and connections. I use my work as a vehicle to examine my personal relationship to technology as both an expressive medium, and a mediation point between self and other.

My primary interest has been in developing Real-time Sound and Visual instruments and interfaces. I use performance, participation, installation and intervention to activate and transform relational spaces, bridging the virtual and the physical. In this way, the work becomes a process of playing with the relationships born of modern conditions.

Failure and malfunction is my Utopian praxis, requiring constant renewal and investigation into the creative openings that occur when things fall apart. Humor often also plays a role in critiques of power structures, both mundane and supramundane, for it allows for us to approach the impossible with humility.

My approach towards composition is inherently social. I use curation as a way to create temporary space for community, and apply composition in order to explore possibilities within a defined space. In this context, performance is a form of game play, and the score is the rules of the game.

This has and does include creating Improvised Electronics Round Robins, Kabbalistic Pinball Synthesizers, Aleatoric Immersive Theater Experiments, alChemical Currency Exchanges in public parks, a Speed Metal Philosophy Lecture/Incursion in a Gallery, light and sound activations in bombed out Chevy Factories, and creating interactive video experiences for glowing screens of varying platforms.