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Oliver Laric, Online Superstar
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Oliver Laric is an Internet star. But he's not the kind of celebrity you often associate with online media.
The twenty-four-year-old
German-born artist is a popular purveyor of web-available video art. (A recent
Google search for "Oliver Laric" yielded 53,000 hits; by comparison, Carson
Daly's YouTube discovery Brooke
Brodack received only 710.) Ever since the Viennese art-school graduate put up some of his work (available on his website), links to his formal
experiments have proliferated.
Highlights include an ongoing cycle of clip art figurines
called "787 Cliparts" and the similarly metamorphic and eerily
haunting "Geisterschloss" (or "Ghost House"). Also
recommended: an excerpt of "Kung Fu Percussion," a sort of visual rap
put together from '70s Chinese chopsocky flicks.
Contacted by email in Vienna, Lyric is cryptic about
the motivations and meaning of his art. But he lists a litany of inspirations,
which seem more puzzling than explicatory, ranging from artists (Helmut Smits,
David Moises, Steve Powers, Cory Arcangel) to philosophers (Slavoj Zizek,
Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio), musicians (Quincy Jones, Daft Punk, James Brown
and Kraftwerk) to filmmakers (Woody Allen, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and
Sergei Eisenstein). I guess it's better to leave one's art open
to interpretation.
