Karl Erickson
Rhodes College
Karl Erickson lives in Memphis, Tennessee. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University. He was raised in the Detroit-area of Michigan, splitting time between farm, city, and suburb. He makes videos and audio/visual-performances about language, transformative experiences, self-betterment and environmentalism. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues. He is particularly interested in how communication and kinship can be made across different entities, plants to humans, machines to animals. Recent exhibitions include “Are You Connect?” at the Electronic Arts Gallery of Colorado State University, “Time For Something Else” with Laurie Nye at Day & Night Projects, Atlanta, "We Could Be Transcendent Apes'' at Field Projects Gallery in New York City, “2020 Megalith'' at The Wrong Biennial, and “Screen2019: Climates'' at UMASS, Amherst, MA. Recent video screenings and performances were included in the Memphis Concrète Experimental Music Festival 2021, The Performing Media Festival at Indiana University South Bend, “Adjusting the Lens: Experimental Film and Video Festival,” at Unrequited Leisure, Nashville, TN, Indie Memphis Film Festival 2019 and 2020, and That One Film Festival in Muncie, IN. He has been an artist in residence at The Arctic Circle, Playspace and Signal Culture. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Art at Rhodes College, Memphis, TN
Three Education Lessons
Three Education Lessons
Three Short Education Lessons depicts a puppet-like monster encountering a world of letters and numbers. These encounters offer an absurdist take on educational programming for children, from Sesame Street to algorithmically produced content on Youtube. The animations present lessons designed to challenge traditional educational objectives. The end goal is to create and learn new languages, to forge new connections, and to find new ways of being right. A segment on the letter “R” highlights the letter in the formation of a variety of words (“are,” “green,” “three”), none of which, of course, start with “R.” The monster wanders through a world of alphabets, encounters the word “blue” and attempts to play it like an instrument. In the end, the monster has a nightmare encounter with a series of letters and numbers. The aspects of education are present: language, demonstrations, repetition, engagement, but the learning outcome is obscure. The animations are made with 3D animation software and motion capture technology. The motion capture is a way of collaborating with the software, as it attempts to translate human movements onto new forms. Glitches occur, resulting in new motions and unexpected outcomes. The animation addresses the idea of weird technology by making the alphabet, one of our oldest tools, uncanny, familiar but not quite right.