Pop Icon: Britney is an art object that considers the shifting meaning of icon. εἰκών (eikon - image), the original Greek word, was used to signify an object of veneration, a staple of Eastern Orthodox and Catholic religious art, depicting religious figures in highly stylized and symbolic ("iconic") poses and tableaux. Pop stars (so-called pop "icons") in American culture find themselves in a similar situation; subjected to a constant mediatization, they become objects of veneration themselves. When they find themselves embroiled in scandal or subjected to gossip, the cognitive dissonance of us, their audience, is analogous to our experience of fallen angels. While this is true for many pop stars in recent years, no one fits this profile more strongly than Britney Spears.

Spears is the first pop star to exist entirely in the age of AutoTune and Photoshop. All of her vocals are digitally corrected and she lip-syncs her live performances; as a result, there is precious little phonographic record of Britney actually singing, merely the digitized re-synthesis of her voice, perfectly in tune. Her imagery, digitally cleaned, cropped and altered, is similarly perfect, despite the fact that her media image perfectly embodies many of the negative double standards embodied in the American objectification of famous women.

Pop Icon: Britney takes all of the extant Britney Spears videos and singles and subjects them to a computational process that locks her eyes in place, allowing the video frame to pan around Britney in the frame, keeping her in a fixed position akin to an Orthodox icon. Her image is stabilized and blurred, creating a constantly shifting halo or aura around her face, reflecting back our gaze. Her voice is stripped from her songs (creating an “a capella” mix) and filtered through the reverberation of the San Vitale Basilica in Ravenna, Italy, once of the most important sites of Byzantine iconography in Western Europe. The piece exists as a generative work on a medium-sized, gilded LCD frame, and has been shown at the PULSE Art Fair in Miami and the Aspen Art Museum during ART/Crush, both in 2011.

artwork at bitforms