Denny Dimin Gallery was pleased to present a virtual exhibition Fuzz Dungeon by Jeremy Couillard from June 8th through July 8th, 2021. The exhibition featured an animated simulation titled Fuzz Dungeon created by Couillard in 2021.
Fuzz Dungeon is a never ending, animated simulation of an inescapable mess of information that goes back and forth from being an intelligible narrative to a hypnagogic mania.
The 24/7 live-stream of the simulation is from the video game of the same title. The stream is coming from a computer in the basement of Denny Dimin Gallery in New York City. It will be broadcast over the Twitch.tv platform, which is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. What you see is an endless journey through 15 levels in the game. In each level there are multiple animated points of view that the computer chooses to possess. There are 26 songs, composed by Chris Parrello and Lobby Hotel, that the computer chooses to pair with each level. There are also poems, shower thoughts, short stories and surrealist rants being typed or spoken, which the computer also chooses at random. A chatbot named Tad Mol is posing questions and thoughts to stimulate discussion during the stream and viewers are encouraged to engage. Every time you visit you will see and hear different things and the numbers on display will continue increasing throughout the month, counting up to an anticlimactic end or a random crash that will restart the whole thing over again.
(The Fuzz Dungeon is now closed, however a simulation of the live stream is viewable above)
Computer simulation streamed live on Twitch.tv
I had this vague idea for this project, that Fuzz Dungeon is this place in your head right before ideas become a real thing. You have these ideas for a utopia, or for a lesson plan in your class, and in your head they exist in one fashion and right when it comes out it turns into a different thing. I thought about what’s that space in between, this goofy, liminal thing, where your ideas transform into something beyond your control.
Artist Jeremy Couillard, composer Chris Parrello, and Becca Keating of the Museum of the Moving Image discuss the transformative elements of Fuzz Dungeon. They talk about new media work, such as Fuzz Dungeon, which can be accessed through multiple interfaces. Since it is impossible to see the entire work on the surface, Parrello brings up how Fuzz Dungeon rewards investigation and time. Couillard and Parrello discuss their very different approaches to new tools, since an aesthetic is formed by the labor it takes to learn each medium. Keating asks Couillard about the text she interprets as a manifesto, whereas Parrello says it’s not the narrative but the feeling that grabs you.
“Our generation is absurdist. I don’t know how to process any of this,” says Parrello echoed by Couillard.
With predictive algorithms, we feed computers some data and they give us our “content” or guide us in making our own, or what feels like our own at least. I’m growing increasingly fascinated by the very mentally fucked up thing I do almost every day where, after closing my laptop, move from chair to couch, put on the TV, and start binging some Netflix show I’ve already seen 2-10 times, while consuming calories and then scrolling Reddit on my phone, until it’s time for bed. I don’t really watch TV anymore. It’s a catalogue of scenarios, jokes, intimate moments and short stories that streams in my apartment every night while I do other things. The edit was probably the major creative innovation of the last century, enabling the entire film and television industry. It’s not about editing anymore, though. It’s about creating a database and programming it to find a satisfying amount of diversity of content that is chosen at an appropriate random amount. This constant saturation of information flooding our senses is giving rise to new emotions. I’m always feeling “bored-but-not-bored.” Not apathetic exactly, emotions and passions coming in waves, attached and detached at the same time.
Educated as a painter, Couillard is a self-taught new media artist who has made numerous well-received and internationally exhibited video, virtual reality, and video game works, accompanied by installations, paintings, and ephemera. His works often deploy humorous narratives about future dystopias to explore what motivates us as humans to work, live, and create.
Jeremy Couillard received his MFA from Columbia University and his BA from Michigan State University. Couillard has exhibited at Zabludowicz Collection (London, U.K.), Phillips Auction House (co-commissioned by daata editions) (New York, NY), Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY), yours, mine & ours gallery (New York, NY), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Louis B. James (New York, NY), Zhulong Gallery (Dallas, TX), Flux Factory (Queens, NY), and has screened his work at the New Museum and Rhizome (New York, NY), Salon 94 (New York, NY), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), and the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA). Couillard’s work has been featured or reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Frieze Magazine, Art in America, VICE’s The Creators Project, The Washington Post, FAD, artnet news, ARTNews, the Huffington Post, and the Observer.
