Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation: whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir

The Walker Art Center presents whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, a film installation by Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, from April 18–July 8, 2012.

This seemingly self-generating sci-fi film never ends, nor does it actually begin. Drawing on more than 30 hours of film and video material that has been converted into digital files—each tagged with terms to identify the contents—whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir is a media piece that selects the order of those files based on an algorithm.

The connections, generated by the so-called "Serendipity Machine," are displayed on the monitor on the left-hand side of the screen. Never the same, the formula develops the story of a mysterious Mr. Holz, an informant traversing a failed utopian in a post-apocalyptic metropolis simply called "Citya."

Continuously shuffling 80 voice-overs, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 clips shot in post-Soviet Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and Dubai as well as on sets in Sussman's Brooklyn studio, whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir offers fascinating insights into genre filmmaking. This is multimedia artist Eve Sussman's third in a series that expands upon the images and implications of well-known paintings. Her first, 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004), imagined the space and time surrounding Velázquez's Las Meninas, and her second, The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007), takes inspiration from the Sabine paintings of Poussin, Rubens, and David.

In this piece, Sussman - with her ad hoc think-tank of collaborators Rufus Corporation—looked to Kazimir Malevich's emblematic 1918 painting White on White as a starting point, building a narrative onto the Russian artist's ideas about abstraction and transcendence.

About the artists Eve Sussman was born in 1961 in England and lives in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown at festivals and museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museu Picasso, Barcelona; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among many others.

Rufus Corporation is made up of artists, actors, musicians, dancers, writers, and a programmer who come together under the direction of Eve Sussman to make film, video, installation, and photography.

Acknowledgements Artists' Cinema is made possible by generous support from Elizabeth Redleaf.

Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation 
whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir