Seth Price (born 1973, East Jerusalem) is an artist living and working in New York City. His work ranges from video and sculpture to written texts, clothing, plastic, wood veneer, CDs, and Internet downloads, among others. Price’s interest in such a variety of media stems from his thoughts on dispersion (the act of driving off or scattering in many directions), which he explains in a text sharing the same noun: “Dispersion”, 2002–. Through dispersion, Price’s intention is to shift emphasis from creating new content to distributing existing content, thereby seizing the process circulation and locating his artwork within networked life. Price asserts that “every cultural endeavor is subject to perpetual permutation today, whether it is written about, photographed, printed, downloaded, forwarded and exchanged, filtered and animated, or bundled with so many other programs or files as to create an entirely new production out of the same material.” (Tim Griffin, Artforum, Summer 2009). Works such as “Dispersion” never remain the same. Price constantly alters the text, adding and subtracting, continually shifting meaning. In his “Essay with Ropes”, 2008, Price printed pages from “Dispersion” onto sheets of plastic, that have been vacuum-formed to knotted rope. With this work, Price’s reflection on technology deepens. The plastic shell, doesn’t present contents, as it typically does in commercial packaging. Instead the contents are supposedly concealed; their existence only hinted at by the plastic façade. This work is simultaneously empty and full. It is this type presence and absence that characterizes Internet communication and hints at a commercial culture in which products find the consumers. Other vacuum-formed plastic works include “Vintage Bomber” jackets, which all recycle the same mold; the uniqueness of the jacket folds are frozen and dispersed. A simultaneous empty/full relationship can be viewed in his pixilated “Silhouettes” from 2007 onward. This series of wall sculptures are formed from wood veneer and cased in acrylic, shaped in part to vaguely resemble state borders. Unseen to most observers, the ragged edges of the sculpture also form negative space profiles of two individuals involved in some form of exchange. Kissing, shaking hands, lighting another’s cigarette, and holding hands, are phantom images defined by the crude jpeg-like, map-mimicking edges of their wood veneer counterparts. These images empty out into the space that they haunt. Like data mining, profiles are drawn through and measured in exchange, the physical exists with its nonmaterial definition, negative space is positive space, and touch is absent. Often times Price plays with our assumptions of what we think to be full. His music that seems like sounds from the past, are of his own making or arrangement, composed in the style of the genre that they emulate. Works from “Title Variable”, 2001–, such as “Video Game Soundtracks”, 1983-1987, create the impression of a past. This retro-fitting can be viewed in his “Calendar Paintings”, 2004, a series of inkjet prints on canvas, that only look dated, but whose production depends on large format digital printing. Price goes beyond techniques of appropriation embraced by Pop Art by playing with visual and sonic motifs that imply history without borrowing or icon-styling. His varied output (which also extends to video (“Digital Video Effect: Spills”, 2004) and fashion (Seth Price/Tim Hamilton dOCUMENTA 13)), are reflections on limitlessness within the “limited”. David Joselit writes: “As the term ‘data mining’ suggests, raw data is now regarded as a ‘natural,’ or at least a naturalized, resource to be mined… (existing) in unwieldy and ever-increasing quantities… Since such data is both superabundant and ostensibly trivial, what gives it value are the kinds of formats it can assume, which may be as wide-ranging as marketing profiles and intelligence on terrorism. Such a shift from producing to formatting content leads to what I call the “epistemology of search,” where knowledge is produced by discovering and/or constructing meaningful patterns—formats—from vast reserves of raw data…” (David Joselit, October, Fall 2011) Seth Price is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Petzel Gallery in New York, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin, and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. See also: Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison, Thomas Schütte, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Seth Price website: distributedhistory.com