Tuning Room - Invoking the Medium

Our present landscapes experience such a free-flowing torrent of mass media that our very psyches are seemingly fused with the sounds and images we consume. In this psychological headlock, they have the power to ‘manufacture’ our collective and individual longings, anxieties and desires. As the pace accelerates, how might such extreme sonic and visual pollution be confronted? Recycling is the first step in Michael Bucuzzo’s artistic research.

Through methods of intervention and subversion, he explores the ways popular media affects and reflects us. Over the course of three short experimental films spanning multiple eras, the research travels from luxury american hotels to contemporary internet data centers in order to challenge the way we encounter sonic and visual culture. Using experience forged in the US commercial film industry, he unfolds the emotional, almost mystical powers embedded within the sounds and images that face us.

A conjuring of distorted sensorial memories, The Cliff brings you into view of a lost hotel whose siren song rings out in the darkness. Through the roving eye of the lens, promotional images of a tropical island resort become an otherworldly medium, resurrecting a space of commercial luxury and western fantasies through the media that helped to sell it.

Crushed under the unbearable weight of time, an airplane has an existential crisis and hijacks itself. A recycling of cinema and advertising, Stress Eating Time explores the suspended space in the air as a zone between life and death, anxiety and calm, technology and spirituality.

Would a dying data center hallucinate the internet before passing on? Through a patchwork of 16mm, digital video and contemporary archival footage, Corridor Blues explores the fragile nature of our digital landscapes and the media that facilitates it

Year

2023