Rex Bruce is the founder and director of Los Angeles Center for Digital Art as well as the founder of the digital program at Artists' Television Access in San Francisco. His work has been shown internationally for over twenty years. More recently, he has emerged as a significant artist and organizer in the burgeoning Renaissance in downtown Los Angeles as well as becoming a leader in the exploding international scene revolving around art, environment and technology. Currently, he is organizing DigitalArt.LA for the DFFLA (Downtown Film Festival -- Los Angeles //www.dffla.com/ ). He also will be putting on a huge digital art blow-out on September 9, 2010 including a screening of "Destricted," featuring work by Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and Larry Clark
Your work often documents iconic images of LA in which nature interacts with an urban environment. Did you make a conscious decision to analyze this interaction in your work?
It is the result of the natural progression of a person of my type having been born here, living here, and working here creatively and all of the thought that goes into that. I have gone over all of that in my mind endlessly, an entire life of worrying about humanity and its soon-to-be catastrophic fate. I grew up in this vast mechanical toxic pit where most of everyone seemed hellbent on destruction and denying the obvious—living in complete abrasion towards nature. And its main business was generating an oblivious complicit culture that does the same.
Do you feel nature and urbanization can exist harmoniously or only in conflict? How does your work reflect this notion?
Urbanization is about the full use of technology as it relates to human survival and culture. Your question is really about how technology can be viewed as intrinsically toxic (which undercuts the prerogative of its use for survival and a flourishing of culture) or if technology has the potential to be healthy or life-giving. My believes tend to be open-ended, which indicates that technology is not intrinsically anything, including toxic. I believe our era is born of a generation that didn't really understand the damaging nature of much of the innovations it generated. There has been a reaction to get rid of it, this kind of 'back to nature' hippie thing. Now I don't think we want to get rid of it at all, we want to transform technologies into something that are not damaging. We are well on our way. Cities do not have to be on a death trip. This is a fantastic project of enormous scope. It is also extremely political and about galvanizing political will, it has everything to do with the old chiché of greed versus good. I think we are up to it. It is a very frightening time, but I believe we will do it. I'm in for the duration—that's for sure.
What visually interests you the most about Los Angeles?
L.A. is not really known for being a beautiful, romantic looking city like Paris or London. It is really this sprawling mess that is vague at best in terms of any identifiable style or look. It is a nerve-shattering chaos of cars, commerce and cheap Tinseltown glitz. But it is that vagueness or Hollywood shoddiness and two-bit fame that gives the city so much character. To take L.A. as a subject and invert it into something visually appealing and socially transcendent is a compelling challenge. I'm from here, so I make it my business. I love it.
For more information about Mr. Bruce and his work, please, visit http://www.lacda.com
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