Apple. Google. Hermès. Balenciaga. Burberry. BMW. Coldplay. An Emmy nomination for editing. A Young Guns 17 win. Conner Griffith’s commercial credentials are impeccable, but what makes him genuinely interesting is what he does when nobody’s briefing him. Based in Los Angeles and trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, he works at the intersection of video art and animation, contorting time, space and perspective to create works that seem to defy any coherent point of view. He is fascinated by collections: the unexpected stories that emerge when images are choreographed against sound, when the familiar is reordered into something stranger and more alive. His short films have screened at Slamdance, GLAS and OIAF. His collaboration with Max Cooper on A Sense of Getting Closer, part of Cooper’s acclaimed On Being project, has since become one of the highlights of Cooper’s live 3D audiovisual shows worldwide.
A Sense of Getting Closer is a collaboration between video artist Conner Griffith and electronic music producer Max Cooper, part of Cooper’s On Being project. The work explores how advertising and social media shape us in the aggregate: the slow, hypnotic accumulation of inputs that nudges us toward new states without us noticing. Griffith’s starting point was his own mailbox, filling up with catalogs he didn’t order and coupons he’d never use. He saw in this pile of what most people call recycling a cultural archive, and began amassing it. Extending the same approach to screens, he abstracted TV ads and social media content by presenting time as a spatial dimension, revealing the patterns that emerge when you strip away context and content. What’s left is unexpectedly beautiful: a hypnotic light show, made entirely from low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms. For Cooper, the music captures the feeling of apprehension and excitement at once, the uncertainty of a moment that might be a necessary stage of transformation. For Griffith, it’s something more open-ended: a hope for collective media literacy, for a future in which we look back at this moment the way we look back at things we once didn’t understand. A hypnotic light show we can’t look away from. We know exactly what it’s made of. We watch anyway.
