video / performance artist, united states (b. 1970) ART | WRITING | CV

Jamie O'Neil (b. 1970) uses the pseudonym Kurt Weibers in his videos and performances. His voice, tone and gesture coalesce into a unique formalism used to subvert authoritarian discourses. As a producer of tactical media interventions, he has posed in self-improvement seminars, staged elaborate hoaxes, and remixed himself into dialogs across time. His clever and humorous projects expose preexisting assumptions in existing communication channels.

A practice engaged with corporate culture; each project subverts the unspoken rules the target’s belief system. Initially misunderstood as a satirist doing activist art, he turned to relational aesthetics to create emergent “social interstices”. His projects produce new discourses in the gap space between science and art. Using his skill in video and new media, his suave spokesman epitomizes Post-PowerPoint persuasion. Inventive, O’Neil’s projects include “operational fictions” in the form of fully functional trade show booths, kiosks, modified electronics, and even a footwear product…his exercise gizmo Skippisox. All of his projects begin with an ultra-real context, often an entire new corporate entity, which becomes a platform to create a “coefficient of art” not unlike Duchamp’s ready-mades, that viewers must negotiate, but in doing so, discover their function as unorthodox models for contemporary problems.

Bio

professional life factoids

Jamie O’Neil has performed, exhibited and screened his projects internationally, at juried festivals, exhibits and conferences including: The Rooftop Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY; Cine Lumiere, Institute Francis, London, UK; The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Toronto, Canada; and The Business Institute (BI) Norway School of Management, Oslo, Norway. Both his written and video essays have been published and presented via The International Digital Media Arts Association, The Media Ecology Association and The American Educational Research Association (among others). In his collaborative projects with Canadian Choreographer Gerry Trentham, he has designed video scenic effects for performances and installations at O’ Vertigo Montreal; Dancemakers, Toronto; and The New Dance Group in New York City.  His work has been funded by The New York State Council on the Arts and The Canada Council for the Arts; and he has been granted numerous research fellowships and artistic residencies. He received his BFA at Boston University, near his hometown; then worked at Weymouth Design Inc. beginning a successful decade-long career in commercial design and video production in Boston and New York. His industry experience was deconstructed in graduate school, and influenced his the development of his alter-ego Kurt Weibers during his MFA studies at SUNY Buffalo’s Visual, Media Studies and Emerging Practices programs. He resides in Buffalo, NY, where his work has been exhibited by The Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and twice included in the regional biennale: Beyond/In Western NY organized by The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He is Associate Professor and Director of The Digital Media Arts Program at Canisius College, and the Co-Director of The Video Institute, which produces media projects that serve as vehicles for social justice.

Statement

why I create projects

My projects exist in the gap space of the real and imaginary: integrating media and live performance. Mediated identity (i.e. how we negotiate ourselves with pre-existing communication channels) led to the creation of my alter ego, Kurt Weibers, but it is also the bridge to my collaborations. I am drawn to the interstice of artistic-scientific understandings because of my commitment to ethics and aesthetics. Our intuition, embodied knowledge, muscle memory, gut-feelings etc. are critical truth centers in our absurd world. Empirically, nothing is more absolute than our sense of movement. Capturing it stops it. Re-creating it through media allows us to recompose time and space, but not without changing everything drastically.  The body wrestling with its own interval-ization through media is a beautiful philosophical dance.