Daniel Peltz

Daniel Peltz is a conceptual artist who creates works that combine installation, intervention and performance strategies. His most recent projects have been staged at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, a glass mill in Reijmyre, Sweden and in the capital city of Yaounde, Cameroon. Peltz was a 2007-08 Fulbright Scholar/Artist-in-Residence at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack in Stockholm and in residence in the fall of 2008 at The School of Arts and Communication [K3] in Malmo as part of the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden [IASPIS]. When not escaping his home country, he lives happily in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where he is an Assistant Professor of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Below/Abajo: Cameraless videos / 2008 / Stockholm, Sweden

Lately, I've been making video installations, performances, and interventions that explore the socially mediating character of live-feed video. I'm trying to figure out what video is and what kinds of knowledge it can generate about the social world, not as an abstraction but as a force of very real transformation. I have increasingly little faith in abstract understandings, I am seeking embodied knowledge. My material is myself and the interactions I have with others in real time, the live-feed. I offer this material to video, as a gesture of good faith, that I might be worthy of the knowledge it contains. I've been thinking of these things I make as media machines in need of human performers. I don't build them for anyone but myself. If you catch me claiming to, don't believe me.