“Hopefully, one day, I’ll have each and every one of you trapped in my jars.”
Using video mapping and projection, artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo captures and shares his memories and friendships. At TED Fellow Talks, he shows his charming, thoughtful work—which appears to preserve the people in his life in jars, suitcases, blenders ...
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo creates living video installation pieces of “miniature people” encased inside ordinary objects.
Barcia-Colombo is an American video artist who creates installation pieces of “miniature people” encased inside ordinary objects such as suitcases, blenders and more. His work focuses on memorialization and, more specifically, the act of leaving one’s imprint for the next generation. Call it “artwork with consequences.”
He says: “While formally implemented by natural history museums and collections (which find their roots in Renaissance-era ‘cabinets of curiosity’), this process has grown more pointed and pervasive in the modern-day obsession with personal digital archiving and the corresponding growth of social media culture. My video sculptures play upon this exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which I renders visually by “collecting” human beings (alongside cultural archetypes) as scientific specimens. I repurpose everyday objects like blenders, suitcases and cans of Spam into venues for projecting and inserting videos of people.”
Barcia-Colombo is an alumnus and instructor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Read about his latest work on CoolHunting and in his TED Fellows profile.
