Art Jones

Last Name: 
Jones
First Name: 
Art

Art Jones is an image/sound manipulator working with film, digital video and hybrid media. His films/videos, CD-ROMs, live audio/video mixes, and installations often concern the inter-relationships between popular music, visual culture, history and power. His work makes extensive use of popular music and mainstream media culture as raw material to be sampled and re-combined in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. Working with a particular genre or mode, the work seeks to explore, destroy or re-orient the conventions of "the media." The formal construction of Jones' mediaworks reflects the rhythms and beat of rap music As a VJ he has performed with a variety of musicians and artists, including Soundlab, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, DJ T-Ina, Amiri Baraka, Femmes with Fatal Breaks and Alec Empire and Phillip Virus. He is a current member of the ITEL Media group and a former member of the Not Channel Zero television collective. His work can be seen internationally in festivals, museums, bars, galleries, and living rooms. . Taking up the controversial reaction of the press to hip-hop and rap music, Jones exposes the implicit racism that lies behind the media's accusations that rap music promotes violence and hatred. Using degraded images to refer to the media's distortion of facts, Jones' work studies the ways in which images are presented reinforce and shape mainstream ideology. Jones' tapes characteristically use high powered collages set to the rhythm and beat of rap music to deconstruct the language and form of commercial music. He works in a variety of old and new media interfaces and continues to perform at various locations in Chicago and New York. He is from the Bronx, New York, and lives and works in and between Chicago and New York