“For nearly ten years, trash has been the focus of a massive project, an audiovisual work called The Appearance Machine, by artists Willy Le Maitre & Eric Rosenzveig. This is a project that deals firsthand with an overabundance of material that won’t go away, and about seeing the beautiful possibilities of trash, giving the act of recycling a new context. The result is conflicting, producing in the viewer a sense of alienation and comfort, disbelief and wonder.

The once aimless material waste becomes the nexus of a unique art project that celebrates waste and the odd notion of an enjoyable wasteland through a complex means of processing and image making. The Appearance Machine’s permanent residence is in New York City, the unofficial center of the detritus crisis as home of the largest landfill in the world. The machine itself is housed in a warehouse space that doubles as a factory or lab for audiovisual ‘performances’ set to an orchestra of digitally produced sound.

The Appearance Machine is a production mill of sorts, a system that generates non-narrative audiovisual by-products, relying on a steady stream of incoming refuge to sustain itself. Trash enters a conveyer belt-like system where objects are photographed in a manner not unlike the way a photographer might capture the image of a fashion model. Artificial wind, mechanical impulses, and vibration work in concert to animate the objects to provide them with context, dimension and, to some degree, personality. Multiple camera angles ensure the same quality of perspective and dimension to produce audiovisual works of art in increments that last for about ten or fifteen minutes…” Continue reading Trash Talk: A Review of The Appearance Machine by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig by Natasha Chuk, Furtherfield.org.