Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Exhibitions of the Brooklyn-based McCoys’ collaborative works tend to have titles like we like to watch or where do we go from here? Their “we” is both themselves, the viewers, and a larger media culture. In a series of electronic installations, interactive media sculptures, and live events that examine the ways our narrative imaginations are structured by popular genres, the Brooklyn-based McCoys create systems that reconfigure popular narrative materials from films, television, and literature into databases of image and sound bytes. Horror Chase, 2002, employs software to randomly resequence clips of footage from a recreation of the climactic chase sequence from the cult class Evil Dead 2. The digitized 16mm footage is run forward and backward in varying speeds and unending permutations, turning the filmic narrative’s foregone conclusion into a panic stricken nightmare with no beginning and no end. Projected from a custom made portable computer housed in a suitcase, Horror Chase takes horror film’s money shot and strips it of its surrounding story, turning narrative into database, and story into archive.

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