Associate Professor Triton Mobley in CURRENTS Virtual Festival

Associate Professor Triton Mobley’s work was recently featured in CURRENTS Virtual Festival via YouTube Twitch and Facebook Live

CURRENTS New Media is Santa Fe, New Mexico’s annual art + technology exhibition. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival was presented via an entirely-online show this year: CURRENTS Virtual 2020. The 11th annual festival accessible to a worldwide audience. 

Mobley’s work in the festival marks a body of research conducted over three years producing a set of speculative design + computation works; an interventionist praxis working towards a critical restructuring for new possibilities on how RGB spectrum could potentially be rendered more equitably. Over this three-year time period of research and praxis Mobley was able to fabricate four design + computation works that iterate their critiques along with the elaboration on production.

Coded #000000 [v1 – Bars + Tones] was the first in the series using computation as its primary mode of inquiry for contrasting the limitations of RGB light against the reproduction blackness. This was followed by Coded #000000 [v2 – Image Processor] which allows for a closer inspection of the viewing image—pixel by pixel. Volumetric Black installation is a fabricated display array providing 16 alternative possibilities for viewing recorded black bodies. And most recently the development of the Volumetric Black Lens system. A camera lens apparatus that attempts to document blackness using a modification of computational RGB.

This work is interested in the gradual revealing of how technology has led viewers to a point where the accuracy of digital representation is in tumult, questioning the logics behind the coded social productions that proliferate through every aspect of our lived experience and coming to terms with the enormity of its half-truths and shortcomings. As the artist David Batchelor articulates in Chromatic Algorithms, “Colour is either the property of some “foreign” body or relegated to the realm of the superficial”. By extension the computational formations in this digital age via RGB spectrum have a shared absence in their make-up—for Occidental thinking of color or pigment becomes an additive process that requires [an] application for its functionality.

Triton Mobley is a new media artist, educator, and scholar whose interventionist works, and guerrilla performances have been exhibited at Art Basel Miami, Art Miami, and staged in Boston, New York, Providence, and across Japan. Triton’s practice culls together samples of seemingly disparate methodologies of critical making in programming, performative installations, speculative design, digital media hacking, and industrial fabrication. Triton holds an MFA in Digital+Media from the Rhode Island School of Design and is a PhD candidate in Media Arts + Practice and Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California. Triton Mobley is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Core in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.