Birthday (2012) Single-channel video, stereo. Digitized photo, digital photos, digitized archive film, digitized archive sound

Most of my work is centered on issues and processes of perception, memory, personal narrative, and the construction of meaning over time. I'm interested in who and what we are, both personally and culturally, especially as a result of choices we make in the process of self-definition. I'm equally interested in issues of perception, definition, and expression in art; I'm interested in vocabulary, structure, technique, and methods.

The majority of my pieces, such as Flight, In tempo, Passing Figure, and
One, two deal with the construction of meaning and personal narrative from biographical sources. Others, such as Epiphany, Signs and Wonders, and Billboard, are concerned with political and mass media discourse as social narrative text. Some pieces--Act II, Crawl, Five Modernist Essays,
Solving for X-- are about art.

I work with any number of elements--video, sampled and synthesized sound and music, photography, film, painting, text--anything digital or that can be digitized. Many of my gallery pieces are video/animation/sound objects meant to be encountered in the same sense and mode in which one encounters traditional gallery media such as painting or sculpture. I often use video, a time-medium, to isolate, freeze, and explore a subject, event, or moment in time. A musician, I tend to build time-structures in reference to strategies and techniques, such as counterpoint, employed in musical composition.

Dziga Vertov (film), Anton Webern (music), and Gerhard Richter (painting) are representative of artists who have had a significant influence on my work. Vertov's ethos in his declaration I am cinema-eye, I am camera-eye, his development of film as a separate reality, nearly an alternative consciousness, have influenced my conception of media composition as a self-referencing language, much like music. Webern's serial work, in which every note is a planet, every movement a universe, suggests to me strategies for the composition of time-forms or time-objects in which the elements of new media are organized within traditional formal structures. I am enormously attracted to the work of Gerhard Richter, who often bases his art on photographs and other preexisting sources, and whose technique includes the ability to control radically different vocabularies, sometimes within the same frame.

Michael Lasater is a professor, musician, filmmaker, and new media gallery artist. He holds degrees in music from the Oberlin Conservatory and the Juilliard School, and performed for more than a decade with ensembles including The Metropolitan Opera, The New Jersey Symphony, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra-Tanglewood, and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Italy.

His training and degrees in video, media, and communication are from Syracuse University. He is the creator and producer of a number of documentaries on subjects in music and literature, with broadcast and distribution by the National Educational Television Association (PBS), Barr Films, Kentucky Educational Television (KET), and Coronet Film & Video. His work has won awards from the American Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film and Television Festival of New York, National Monitor Awards of New York, and U.S. Film and Video Festival, Chicago.

His gallery work in video, animation, and sound has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Significant venues include the Hun Gallery, New York; Art in General, New York; Örebro International Videoart Festival, Sweden; Vetlanda Museum, Sweden; artvideoKÖLN, Germany; Los Angeles Center for Contemporary Art; Kansas City Artists Coalition; Union Street Gallery, Chicago; Around the Coyote Gallery, Chicago; Contemporary Arts Center, Las Vegas; California Museum of Photography; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana; Athens Institute for Contemporary Art; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; Pennsylvania School of Art & Design; and South Shore Art Center/Boston Cyberarts Festival.

www.michaellasater.net