The McCoy's have been artistic collaborator's since 1990. Together they have made a wide range of film, video, installation, and performance works. Their joint projects have been shown in the US and in Europe.
Jennifer McCoy was born in the USA in 1968. Her work includes video, performance, installation and multimedia. Her work involves the minutiae of physical experience and its interface with everyday, domestic reality. She completed her MFA in 1994 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she studied Electronic Art. She is an Assistant Professor of Computer Graphics at Brooklyn College.
Kevin McCoy was born in 1967. He is a media artist who works with interactive multimedia, video, computer graphics, installation, and performance. His work addresses the interface of perception, communication and technology, and explores the rhetoric of the new media economy. He completed his MFA in Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, in 1994. He is an Assistant Professor of Multimedia in the Art Department at the City College of New York.
The McCoy's currently live and work in New York City, USA.
Conceptual Description
Small Appliances is a two-channel interactive digital video installation and CD-ROM. The work departs from themes of domesticity and electricity as a way of focusing on women's experience with technology, presenting these experiences using both narrative and abstract video material. The narrative of small appliances consists of 10 short stories told by 10 different women.
The viewer can control the narrative and visual flow of these stories, controlling the images that appear beyond the stove. In the installation version, these images are projected onto the gallery wall. These movements from subjective to objective points of view happen through interaction with a kitchen sink filled with animated bubbles. Sculpturally, the viewer looks out from the vantage point of a 1940's environment to witness the present complex commingling of subjective experience with technological processes. Interactivity is understood as a means for regulating the flow of memory.
This nonlinear, experimental experience are echoed in both a CD-ROM and Internet version of the piece, where viewers move through a graphical representation of the domestic installation environment, with the chosen path determining a specific thread for organizing the narrative material of the work. The CD-ROM includes over 70 minutes of video and sound, giving the viewer a full sensory experience.