In his recent works, {transmission} and re_collection, Magruder looks at reality through the eyes of our two new best "friends": the cell-phone camera, and of course the inevitable Internet. In both works he addresses the notion of our perception of reality, both on the personal and the global level. In both works, reality is visually fragmented by the binary medium that carries it. His visual creations examine the nature and sources of the images we consume on a daily basis, be it images produced by global networks or ones we produce ourselves. He processes image bits and information fragments into a single unified composition that conveys more than just the information it processes. The excellent technical quality of the final product enhances the visual experience, and the smoothness allows the viewer/user to focus on the artwork instead of being distracted by irrelevant bugs or network delays.

In {transmission}, Magruder assembles a layered transmission of global news taken from the BBC's live Internet news services. This raw material is sampled and processed in real time, then recomposed again using the artist's custom-made tools. The original images extracted from BBC site are fragmented, and then juxtaposed again on scrolling Asian characters. The technique of composing images from characters is originally known as "image to ASCII", but in this work, Magruder uses scrolling Asian characters (an allusion to the artist's biography) to create the image. As the characters slowly scroll and change, one image fades into another. Magruder accompanies this visual composition by a matching audio one, where he makes use of the radio broadcast available on BBC site. The original audio stream is occasionally disrupted by static noise and other filters, making it sound as if broadcast from a distance. This remoteness effect is reminiscent of news broadcasts from distant places, back in the days when distance was still a meaningful physical obstacle.

In this composition, Magruder uses almost every possible medium: text, radio, photographs, binary encoding and digital transmission. The resulting visual complexity and information-rich content shift the viewer's focus from what is being transmitted to how it's being transmitted. This rich mixture makes the viewer reflect on the processes involved in manufacturing and broadcasting news and information. We are seldom aware of those processes when consuming our daily information dose. The strong visual effect produced by the scrolling Asian characters is suggestive of Matrix (the movie), where reality was also a binary illusion, the product of machines. This work raises the ever present question of how we perceive our global reality; how are the images and texts reworked and combined to provide us with our understanding of the global environment?

In re_collection, Magruder proceeds to fragment our personal reality, using a different platform, but still an extremely popular one: the cell-phone camera. In this work, he uses a "smartphone" camera as an artistic tool. According to the artist's site, "A subject was recorded [in Hyde Park, London] without direction utilizing only an SVP c500 smartphone as a cinematic device. From the resulting material a single 14-second audio/video stream was extracted”. In the short text found on the web page, Magruder addresses our human desire for immortality through memory, a desire that actually motivates (along with downloading every movie ever created) the digital storage industry. This desire is epitomized in Microsoft's ambitious lifetime storage project MyLifeBits, which seriously suggests we should turn our lives into bits on disks."

The artistic process continues by displaying the resulting stream on different display devices commonly encountered in our ubiquitously computed mundane routine "the cell-phone screen, the PDA and the computer screen. Each of these devices, through its different resolution and other display parameters, presents a different image of the same image stream, and is thus consequently differently interpreted by the viewer. The resulting images are the visual representation of an encounter between organic form and movement (the subjective presence), and the fragmenting storage device" the wellspring of immortality.

Magruder employs the same technique in another fragmented short image stream, aptly named Encoded Presence, where "a subject was requested to generate cinematic content interpreting the notion of 'auto-portrait'." Here the encounter between live performance and storage device is at its strongest. The rigid pixels fragment the fluid, continuous movement into strange surfaces made up of squares. The expressive face is transformed into abstract clusters of greenish pixels. An abstract moment is instantly translated into a collection of moving abstract pixel surfaces.

In some sense, Magruder takes this routine activity ad absurdum. He records simple routine moments (a walk in the park), or highly intimate moments (self portrait) by using the ever so popular cell-phone camera. He then replays these captured moments through different display options. The result is ambiguous. The phone screen is too small, the PDA too small and fragmented, while the computer screen makes the fragmentation so gross that you can only guess what was originally recorded on it. These effects beg the following question: Do we really wish to be remembered as an abstract stream of pixels?

{transmission} is exhibited at the Courtauld Institute of Art: London, UK.
Encoded Presence is part of Le Nu/The Nude : group exhibition : Incident.net : Internet
Re_collection (along with other works) can be seen at www.takeo.org