Tony Oursler with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

Tony Oursler is an American multimedia and installation artist. Always rooted in the medium of film, Tony Oursler conjures sculptural and immersive experiences using technologies that hark back to magic lanterns, Victorian light shows, camera obscura and auratic parlor tricks, but that also look forward to the fully networked, digitally assisted future of image and identity production. As a pioneer of video art in the early 1980s New York, Oursler specialized in hallucinogenic dramaturgy and radical formal experimentation, employing animation, montage and live-action: “My early idea of what could be art for my generation was an exploded TV”. From performative and low-fi beginnings, Oursler has developed ever-evolving multimedia and audio-visual practice utilizing projections, video screens, sculptures, and optical devices, which might take form as figurative puppets, ethereal talking automatons or immersive, cacophonous environments. His enduring fascination for the conjunctions between the diametrically opposed worlds of science and spiritualism has allowed him to explore all kinds of occult and mystical phenomena. Tony Oursler lives and works in New York.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer, editor, artist, and interviewer. She currently teaches several graduate programs at SVA and is spending her time in quarantine learning to embroider. From 2017 to 2019 she was the Senior Art Editor at the Rail, and she is now an Editor-at-Large.