Andrew Norman Wilson (artist)

Education

Wilson went to Medfield High School in Medfield, Massachusetts. He received a BS in Television, Radio, and Film from the New House School of Communications at Syracuse University in 2006. Wilson then received an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011.

Virtual Assistance

Wilson's video work Virtual Assistance (2009–11) was made while he was an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In this piece Wilson documents his use of a personal assistant outsourcing service located in India called GetFriday. The work presents Wilson’s relationship with Akhil, his 25-year-old personal assistant. Instead of asking Akhil to complete the tasks he's used to doing for other clients - such as email, finances, and calendar management - Wilson reversed this by asking Akhil to assign him tasks and to come up with ideas for collaborative projects.

Why is the No Video Signal Blue?

This 2011 video, essay, and audio file was originally created for the online publication Pool. It was later adapted into an installation for Wilson and Sayre Gomez’s Windows & Mirrors show at the gallery New Capital in Chicago, IL. The piece consists of digital images that include the color blue and a voice-over of Wilson asking Sony’s customer service as to why the color blue is projected when no signal is connected to Sony’s digital projectors.

Workers Leaving the Googleplex

Andrew Norman Wilson's Viral Video Piece Workers Leaving the Googleplex piece contains footage of two Google locations in Mountain View, California with a voice-over narrative spoken by Wilson. The content for this video came out of Wilson’s experience of working at Google in 2007. The piece presents the class structure of Google shown through Wilson’s encounter with the yellow-badge workers, a top-secret group of workers that scan books for Google Book Search. The artist’s attempts to film and interview the yellow-badge workers were stopped quickly by Google security and resulted in the termination of his employment at Google. The video alludes to Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory by Auguste and Louis Lumière and it went viral when it circulated on the Internet in 2011.

ScanOps

This project is a photographic series made of Google Books images in which errors in the scanning process are visible. The yellow-badge workers that are the subject of Workers Leaving the Googleplex is the same group of workers responsible for the scanning of books for Google Books images.

Movement Materials and What We Can Do

Throughout Movement Materials and What We Can Do Wilson presents an overview of Workers Leaving the Googleplex and ScanOps while imbuing his analysis with considerations of medium and art, film, and literature histories. In this performance the materiality of analog and digital media, and their labor processes, are addressed.

SONE

SONE (formerly known as Stock Fantasy Ventures) consists of proposals to investors to fund the creation of commercial image concepts that will then be distributed on both the art market and stock media marketplaces such as Getty Images. The images are meant to supply the global market of advertising, business, art, and journalism with imagery represents widespread feelings of financial uncertainty and discontent. Public Investor Meetings have been held at Tank Magazine Headquarters, Palazzo Peckham for the 55th Venice Biennale, Impakt Headquarters in the Netherlands, and the I Never Read Art Book Fair in Basel, Switzerland. The project had its solo gallery debut at Project Native Informant in London in June 2014.

Uncertainty Seminars

"Uncertainty Seminars" is both a single channel video and a multi-channel video installation that was first shown at Fluxia in Milan in the spring of 2014. The architecture and objects were made in collaboration with artist Nick Bastis.

Image Employment

Image Employment is a curatorial project produced with collaborator Aily Nash that debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2013. It presents recent moving image works that investigate various modes of contemporary production. The selected works illustrate differing approaches to the subject, from observational films that avoid participation in capitalistic image creation, to videos that engage corporate omnipotence by employing its processes, as well as works that complicate these two tendencies.

Artists included in the exhibition: Michael Bell-Smith, Neil Beloufa, Guy Ben-Ner, Ben Thorp Brown, DIS, Harm van den Dorpel, Dan Eisenberg, Kevin Jerome Everson, Harun Farocki, Zachary Formwalt, Mark Leckey, Sharon Lockhart, Auguste and Louis Lumière, Lucy Raven, Ben Rivers, Hito Steyerl, Superflex, Pilvi Takala, Ryan Trecartin, Andrew Norman Wilson

Dream Factory

Dream Factory is a curatorial project produced with collaborator Aily Nash that has shown at Import Projects in Berlin, the Intern VIP Lounge at Art Dubai in Dubai, ETCAMA in Amsterdam, To Look is to Labor at CCS Bard/Basilica Hudson in Hudson, NY, and Image Employment at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY. It presents artists' moving image and media work that recapitulate corporate imagery and language as both a critique and recognition of the omnipotence of these systems through considering the various modes of examining new forms of labor, consumption-as-production, and the aesthetics and visual language of globalized "lifestyles". From videos that present the agency of objects in relation to consumers, to the consideration of the space of labor through interventions into sites of emergent industries and globalized consumption, performative and farcical rhetoric, exaggerated uses of prosumer editing and motion graphics tools, and reverent appropriations of advertising imagery—these makers explicitly engage dream factory capitalism.

Reality Models

Reality Models is an extended remake of a scene from Peppermint Park, an obscure educational home video series produced in the 1980s by a group of investors seeking to profit off the narrative models that Sesame Street invented for educational children’s entertainment. It debuted online in Wilson's article The Artist Leaving the Googleplex for e-flux.

The Unthinkable Bygone

Through the use of Baby Sinclair, a puppet character from Jim Henson’s 1990s animatronic dinosaur sitcom Dinosaurs, The Unthinkable Bygone conflates scientific visualization (3D modeling, simulation, endoscopy, dissection, reflection) and cinematic technique to reconstruct science as a cultural practice.

Ode to Seekers 2012

Ode to Seekers 2012 is a looped video that celebrates mosquitoes, syringes, and oil derricks through the use of both live action footage and 3D animation. Its formal composition is based on a translation of the poetic techniques used in John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Exhibitions

Andrew Norman Wilson's exhibitions include Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2016), the Gwangju Biennale (2016), the Berlin Biennale (2016), the Bucharest Biennale (2016), and On Sweat, Paper and Porcelain at Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2015), Office Space at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2015), Art Post Internet at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014), Scars of Our Revolution at Yvon Lambert in Paris (2014), and Image Employment at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York (2013). Solo exhibitions include Fluxia in Milan, Project Native Informant in London, Document in Chicago, threewalls in Chicago, Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His work has screened in Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal, the New York Film Festival, Prospectif Cinema at the Centre Pompidou, #VOICEOVER at the Palais de Tokyo, the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the Images Festival. He has lectured at Oxford University, Harvard University, Universität der Künste Berlin, and CalArts. His work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Buzzfeed, e-flux publications, Frieze, Gizmodo/Gawker, The New Yorker, and Wired.