Brent Watanabe's 'So Long' blends low- and high-tech

Seattle artist Brent Watanabe's work has all the goofy appeal of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

It blends high-tech ingenuity with the low-tech pleasures of drawing and line animation. While the imagery Watanabe comes up with is charmingly naive, the work as a whole is anything but simple.

Take his video installation, "Stack:Heap:Loop," seen at this year's Bumbershoot. What seems at first to be a finite video loop is actually an infinitely varied work of computer-animation drawing on video-game logistics, portraying a mother duck and her ducklings waddling through surreal, detritus-ridden landscapes. (You can see an excerpt from it on Watanabe's Web site: www.creepco.com).

Now Watanabe has upped the ante with "So Long," a multimedia installation at Jack Straw New Media Gallery that breaks out of video-only confines into three- dimensional reality.

The "star" of "So Long" is another bird: a cheerful but hapless wrenlike creature with a preposterously large onion-shaped head, seen on a small video monitor. As the little guy paces his way through a shapeshifting house in time to a clock's ticking, question marks and musical notes issue from his beak — and are magically absorbed by him, too.

Floorboards come and go. The furnishings are tidy one moment, in disarray the next. The planking is sometimes solid, sometimes porous. A hurdle of flashing letters occasionally fizzes into view — but can't impede his progress.

Instead, he bobs right through it. The chaotic, four-speaker soundtrack — moaning winds, tolling bells, telephones, ethereal chimes, bird song, the odd bomb explosion — can't stop him either. True, that thunderous soundtrack boom does discombobulate him, but only briefly before he continues — intrepidly, absurdly, endearingly — on his way.

He is not, however, the only presence in the room. The elevated TV monitor on which he appears looms over a white-cardboard archipelago on a black-carpet sea. On one "island," an object — I won't say which — comes to intermittent life, although it looks at first as lifeless as a paper cutout. In another corner, a video projection of a leafless tree, festooned with bells and fluttering car-lot streamers, is as shaken by the bomb explosions as the bird is.

What's going on here?

Well, something strangely like life itself in its blend of repeated patterns and random occurrences.

"Everything in the show," Watanabe explains, "is created and controlled by custom computer applications I wrote." There's no start or conclusion to the "programs" on display. Instead, Watanabe says, the various parts of the installation function "like a video game that controls itself and has no end and no way of winning."

While there's an element of whimsy to "So Long," there's also an element of menace. That red stain spreading down the black-and-white tree trunk — is it blood? That ticking clock — is it counting off the seconds until our doom? That bomb that keeps shaking things up — it may not wipe everything out, but it sure is nerve-wracking.

In short, "So Long" strikes a number of contradictory, complementary notes. It manages to be both complex and droll, antic and entrancing. It certainly makes you want to see more by this eccentric innovator, who will expound on his work — or maybe just add to its mystery — with a talk he's giving at Jack Straw at 7 p.m. Nov. 20.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com