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Lincoln Schatz’s work is interested in identity, portraiture and perception. Schatz began his career as a sculptor and in 2000 made the transition from the making of objects to working in video. His video works, which he calls “generative portraiture,” take indiscrimanant footage of the viewer, compiling the images in a computer software which collages the footage into beautiful video archives capturing all the visitors to the piece.

I am fascinated by the concept of reality as perception and perception as reality. I view my life as a chance series of events. What they mean is open for interpretation and questioning. How do we account for the paths we take and those which we do not? In response to this question I have embraced chance as a methodology. This approach does not negate structured thought and action. Rather, it allows the process to remain open to the unexpected, ensuring its vitality.
— Lincoln Schatz, 2008

“The self-casting also recalls Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room, 1974. You exist simultaneously in the real space-time and just-past space-time of the foyer… With one foot in the past and another in the present, you are yourself-becoming-other.”
— Charissa N. Terranova, Art Papers, July/August 2007

Esquire’s anniversary issue, to be published in September, will examine the century that is just beginning, in part by profiling the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. Esquire and Hearst commissioned the sculptor and new-media artist Lincoln Schatz to create a work that would unite many of these people in a single dynamic portrait. From May through September, Schatz will create dozens of individual portraits in his CUBE, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot translucent box fitted with 24 cameras that stream digital video to 24 computers. During each one-hour sitting, CUBE subjects are encouraged to represent their personalities, interests, and values in whatever ways they choose. Then, using thousands of these video files, Schatz creates a portrait made up of a randomized, perpetually evolving progression of overlapping images. Moored in the moment but never quite the same thing twice, Schatz’s “generative” portraits have an infinite ability to reconfigure perception and reorder time.

To view portraits and to learn more about the project select the following link: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/cube/

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to present Cube by Lincoln Schatz. The exhibition will run from February 8 to March 15, 2008, with a public reception for the artist on February 8th from 6 to 8pm. The public is welcome.

Lincoln Schatz’s second solo exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art will continue in the tradition of his previous generative new media works, but with an extraordinary interactive component. His new work for the exhibition, titled CUBE, consists of a translucent Plexiglas room built within the gallery and embedded with 24 video cameras to create densely layered video portraits from one hour sittings with invited guests and patrons. There will be a public reception on February 8th from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be in attendance.

Portraiture has historically been a means to immortalize oneself in carefully staged, single timeless moment. Loaded with visual signifiers and coded messages, a traditional portrait is designed to allow the subject to broadcast his personality and individuality (often focusing on position and status). Sitting for a Generative Portrait still requires the subject to come prepared with their own symbols of identity and ideal representation, but both subject and artist cede control of the final result in how those representations interplay.

The subject is given one hour within the CUBE. During that hour in the CUBE anything can be done, anyone can be with them. The subjects are only bound by their notions of themselves. The 24 video cameras will simultaneously record 60 minutes from their unique perspectives inside the CUBE. Subjects are asked to bring their own music and whatever objects (furniture, meal, animal, etc) or other people they would like to have included in the portrait. The resulting collection of video footage is endlessly recombined. This results in a multi-perspective, continuously developing Generative Portrait delivered on a 60” screen with a computer running the artwork. The idea of manipulating time through compression, expansion and reassembly are central to Lincoln’s work. The CUBE will function as both an object and a portrait space. Subjects are encouraged to explore the unique possibilities presented to them during their hour within the CUBE. They could do ANYTHING.