Jeremy Bailey.

Sayej, Nadja

Jeremy Bailey

2 of 2 Gallery | Toronto, Canada

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A tall, lanky lad clad in turtlenecks, Jeremy Bailey is a nerdy spin doctor who touts a deadpan brand of performance and video art. "Machine Ego," his recent show at Toronto's 2 of 2 Gallery (through April 4), attempts to upstage or reboot contemporary art's technological death drive. Offering something like a user's guide to 3-D art by way of Monty Python, his bubblegum acts all feature his many, bespectacled personas--part TV host, techno geek and garrulous class clown. Using blinking visual aids and Pee-wee Herman props, he's a sort of digital Jim Henson shanghaied by his own pixilated crew.

As producer, star and editor of his work, Bailey follows in the footsteps of videographers like Cory Arcangel, David Rokeby and Ben Coonley. But in YouTube circles, Bailey is bigger than big (his VideoPaint 2.0 received an astounding 18,753 hits two years ago). Co-founder of Toronto video collective 640 480, he studied with Tom Sherman at Syracuse University and since then has shown at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Ingeniously telegenic, he's no fool when it comes to graphic design and ad-speak. Even when he's not promoting faux trends and interfaces in his videos--where we get everything but the PayPal button--Bailey is acting out the quintessential folly of techno selfhood.

In Transhuman Dance Recital (2007), for example, what starts out as a lecture ends up a music video, where he bounces around with Technicolor tentacles to New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" alongside a small blue triangle with round, blinking eyes. More than just another DIY programmer, there's a reason for all this eye candy. Transhumanism, an international movement that advocates technology as an aid to mental and physical development, goes a long way toward explaining Bailey's frothy success online.

In the six-episode series SOS (2008), he updates ordinary computer programs using Kandinsky-shaped tools. "What we've got here is not a desktop, it's a canvas," he enthuses from a box floating across the screen. "Your computer is a painting and your files and folders have been replaced by shapes and colors." Redolent of a pyramid scam, Bailey's artificially intelligent Pac-Men are mere pawns in his Toastmasters diatribes about video as revenge (episode 2) and how to commit social suicide through isolation (episode 6).

Bailey may ramble on to the point of exhaustion--where's the mute button?--but finally tears up the floor in Video Terraform Dance Party (2008). Using a topographical map to model his brave new art world, he demonstrates what would happen if artists really took control--apparently they'd plant a towering museum at the core of their island paradise, invite a nuclear attack and then party their apocalyptic asses off.