Jason Brown
area: Research & Digital Art
Key Facts
nationality
USAarea
Research & Digital Artresidence
Los Angelesrecommending institution
monochromtime period
December 2023 - December 2023Jason Brown is a Los Angeles based artist and technologist who’s work focuses on the “paranoid” nature of memory technology. He’s lectured and performed at the the Hammer Museum, LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, NYU, MIT, Sorbonne University, Pasadena Armory, Southern Exposure (SF), Machine Project (LA), Cabinet (NYC), Metalab (Vienna), and a basement in LA’s Chinatown. He has a BA in Religious Studies and Digital Art from University of California Santa Barbara, and an MFA in Integrated Media / Writing from CalArts. He’s helped run non-profit, educational art spaces for more than 20 years, and is currently the technical director of Art in the Park LA, research director of Superbunker, and janitor of Betalevel.
During his residency at MQ, Jason Brown will compile and expand hisParanoid Machines series, which began 25 years ago as a wry examination of the conspiratorial logic inherent in hypertextual memory machines.
Now that this twisted logic and the monstrous progeny of hypertext have come to dominate global culture and politics, he will be forced to deal with his utterly useless prescience, and/or confront his own culpability in helping camouflage the looming threat behind poetics and games.
He’ll give particular attention to the embodiment of imaginary worlds in the Anthropocene, and how our collective hopes and delusions accrete around us, forming the possibilities we’re left to work with. Fueled by the once-utopian networked proximity of all the world’s information, we now have to navigate epochal challenges in a post-truth battlefield of weaponized unreality.