Catalogue > At random

Aura Dies Hard (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy) joins the artist after having just returned from a museum survey exhibition of video art. Through the course of the following video essay, the artist reflects on the rhetoric of "dematerialization" often linked with early video (and conceptual and performance art more generally). Proposing an alternative, "materialist" read, in which the (often unauthorized) duplication and circulation of artist video paradoxically help perpetuate its mythic beginnings, the artist ultimately reveals that copying technologies and art world protocol have made it possible for him to obtain all the videos encountered at the museum show, clips of which are played throughout the narration.

Nate Harrison is an artist and writer working at the intersection of intellectual property, cultural production and the formation of creative processes in electronic media. He has produced projects and exhibited for The American Museum of Natural History, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Kunstverein in Hamburg and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, among others. He has also lectured at the University of Glasgow, Experience Music Project, Seattle and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, New York, among others. Nate co-directed the project space ESTHETICS AS A SECOND LANGUAGE from 2004-2008. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts and is a doctoral candidate, Art and Media History, Theory and Criticism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. Currently Nate is on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and lives in Brooklyn, New York with a lovely wife and two pesky cats.