Thinking gaze

Critic Christopher Miles describes Tony Oursler's disturbingly manic and technically fascinating video installations thus: "A personality fragments when multiple images of a single babble-spouting face are projected onto side-by-side heads of varied sizes--the main psyche and all the little voices in the nooks of the mind--and elsewhere dolls debate, exchange mania and commiserate. Enormous eyes blink and watch from the spheres onto which they're projected; a massive fiberglass skull becomes a screen for a montage of fragmented faces; and assorted figures hang around (literally), voicing concerns, barking demands and offering speculation about their world." This volume, published concurrently with an international traveling exhibition, provides an in-depth examination of the artist's psychologically charged environments--in which he flips through Postmodern themes such as alienation, media manipulation and fragmented consciousness as restlessly as an insomniac channel-surfing on late-night TV.