Michael Chernoff is a Film and Video Installation Artist working with the interactivity of video screens. Using past and new media technology, Chernoff’s Video Archaeology practice is the assembly of salvaged analog and digital video equipment to generate signals and intermedia sculptures that become subjects for films, installations, and VR projects. Chernoff’s films and video art aim to make the presence of video known. His video art achieves immersivity and engagement from users and performers, who navigate and activate video apparatuses though feedback via open-surveillance, multi-channel feeds, modular latency, and signal processing. His films document and speculate about the materiality and perceptual effect of video technology as a story subject. The overarching view held by Chernoff is that video’s cultural dominance comes from its occupation of real space. Wherever VIDEO is present, all locations, subjects, and activity inside and outside of the screen go LIVE. Chernoff chooses to look at video in all its historic forms to produce interdisciplinary research that veers away from mundane determinations of video as another media object, to instead to identify video as a collective form of total surveillance, simulation, detection, and extraction of events. Chernoff’s future goal is to research and develop video as an open communicator for sustainability through developing virtual signal processing.
Michael Chernoff’s films and artwork have been supported by institutions such as FEED Media Center, Buffalo International Film Festival, the Chroma Art Festival, and more. He teaches digital media, 3D modeling/animation, and installation art for the School of Visual Art + New Media, SUNY Fredonia. Other themes in his work include virtuality, glitch, compression, time, and expanded cinema.