Michael Takeo Magruder has an uncommon sensibility for crossing genres in his works. His practice exhibits a New Media formalism in the representation of information, a seeming Matrix-esque obsession with the same as the fabric of reality, and the use of that information to create a form of "real-time media criticism." Through the combination of aesthetics, code and analysis, Magruder's artworks show a deep understanding of New Media culture, and the technologies that form its foundation.

Magruder's developments in the aesthetics of information are best illustrated in Encoded Presence1 and Re_Collection2. In these pieces, the video as signifier of the real is abstracted, foregrounding the issues of digital mediation. The image aliases and so reconfigures into a Close-seque hinterland between real-time representation and digital minimalism. In both pieces, clear remnants of the physical are evident, but the image is now unapologetically digital.

Later works combine the addition of media criticism with this digital aesthetic. The Fallujah3 series hybridises censored video from the second Iraq War conflict with live captures from the BBC web-site. This data is overlaid as cultural codes upon the aestheticized warfare, commenting on the mass media's fetishization of tragic spectacle. These compositions mirror the media's abstraction of the real through Magruder's combination of the aesthetic and the critical.

Data_cosm combines all of these elements through the abstraction of media sources and associated imagery into a 3D real-time virtual space. The Baudrillardian mediascape unfolds before the viewer through Magruder's interpretative filters. A matrix of constantly updating data planes surround the spectator, creating a Gibson-esque dive into the information unfolding around the net.denizen. The spectacle now surrounds the viewer's gaze, threatening to envelop the eye forever. All that is left is for the eventual colonization of the other senses, and for the media to bleed off the screen and merge with the physical.

[ Real-time Media Criticism, Patrick Lichty, Editor-in-Chief, Intelligent Agent Magazine ]

1. http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns012/
2. http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns016/
3. http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns011/