Nadav Assor was the 2010 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.

Nadav’s work performatively mediates cities, bodies and personal narratives via lo-fi reenactments of appropriated military-industrial technologies, examining technological mediation as an essential and transformative human condition. Nadav has exhibited internationally in festivals, music venues, museums and galleries in North America, Israel, Europe and Asia. Some recent venues for his work include ISEA Vancouver, Transmediale Festival in Berlin, European Media Arts Festival, the Soundwave Biennial in San Francisco, Residency Unlimited NYC, Spectrum NYC, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the Koffler Center in Toronto, Julie M Gallery Tel Aviv, Xuzhou Museum, China, and many others. Assor’s work has been featured in publications such as Art Forum, Art Monthly, Haaretz, ArtAsiaPacific, the Creators Project, Motherboard, and more. Nadav holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Art & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2010). He is among the 2011 awardees of the Israeli Ministry of Culture’s Young Artist awards. Since 2012, Nadav has been an Assistant Professor of Expanded Media and a Fellow at the Ammerman Center for Art & Technology in Connecticut College.

Cut Stories, his Edes year project, is an installation in which 8 monitors of varying sizes serve as one semi-circular, layered screen, displaying any of six short, true personal narratives covering a range of subjects, from an intimate night conversation in Brasil ending with a man running through the fog holding a severed cow leg, to an American sex scene involving fractured bones and religion, to other tales of surgeries, injuries and car accidents: all transgressions into the participants invisible personal spaces.

The visitor to the installation enters a darkened space in which a panorama of faces is spread over the arc of monitors. It is a constantly panning image shot from the center of a circle of seated participants: most are listening to the story being told by one of them.

Beyond these, in the shadows is the Apparatus: another circle of people, all holding cameras of every type, documenting the event, rotating, contracting and expanding around the inner circle in a dance of mediation. This seemingly continuous image of seated people is actually comprised of adjacent windows into consecutive points of time within the single, constantly panning video: these are tiled next to each other so as to create the illusion of continuous space. The effect of this is that only the central monitor is showing the current, audio-synced, real time. The others are showing adjacent participants at moments that are increasingly further away from the present, towards either the future (left) or the past (right).

Cut Stories: excerpts from installation documentation 2010 from Nadav Assor on Vimeo.