From a billboard detergent advertisement to the weather forecast on the morning radio, from the menu at a favorite restaurant to snippets of conversation overheard in line at the DMV, we constantly process, sort, and decide how to store information. Archives are necessarily formed—all the weather forecasts in the past week, for example—and, in real time, we splice bits of them together to form private narratives that give shape to experience. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, collaborators since 1996 and based in Brooklyn, have for the past eight years often used digital technology as a proxy for this process, exploring concepts of narrative, repetition, archiving, the database, and the influence of media in our everyday lives. The technology they deploy—in obsessively edited videos, on websites, in live events, or in sculptural installations—with its underlying code of ones and zeros, is a metaphor for our mental systems of classification. Wisely the McCoys use it as a means rather than an end. Without becoming didactic or losing visual appeal, their art perceptively exposes the strict organization by which we cope with a glut of information.

Soft Rains (2003), exhibited at FACT, Liverpool, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, and at Postmasters Gallery in New York, treads on our mental library of cinematic images by using digital technology to stitch together hackneyed narratives lifted from countless genre flicks. Seven tabletop sculptures on pedestals of varying height, each a miniature film set made by hand and populated with figures ordered from a German model railroad manufacturer, become settings we have little trouble recognizing: there's the David Lynch chilller and James Bond thriller, a Fellini classic, a noirish lounge scene, and an artsy indie film featuring a warehouse loft-slash-studio. Our omniscient eye peers down at these lifeless scenes through a phalanx of small video cameras and lights on flexible metal arms, each precisely pointed to a specific part of the (non-)action. An earlier exhibition of some of this work had a working title of “Robot Films,” and indeed the McCoys cede the directorial “Action!” and “Cut!” to a computer, which in real-time feeds the cameras' motionless views through a program that composes an endlessly reorganizing “film” made of roughly minute-long fragments, each containing six to ten shots. The slivers of would-be narrative, aided by a score partly taken from actual films and partly composed for the work, lose none of their cinematic magic from this concession. Instead, despite presenting the mechanics of creation (the sculptural film sets and their attendant cameras) and the product (the resultant “film”) in the same place, Soft Rains encourages a double suspension of disbelief that leaves the viewer to focus on either the deft craftsmanship of the former or the emotional tug of the latter.

The McCoys' use of live video can be seen as a nod to the pervasive use of the medium by artists in the late 1960s, when it often was accompanied by a performative element. In Soft Rains, it is the viewer that engages in a kind of performance, willingly bridging (in both directions) the distance between the temporal, two-dimensional presentation of the filmic image on screen and the static, three-dimensional presentation of the tabletop sculptures. Another way to put it is that viewers can enjoy trying to pair the on-screen scenes with the cameras from which they come.

The construction of quasi-narrative in Soft Rains is a clever foil to the deconstruction of the artists' “Every” series (2001-2002). Working with images from the 1970s TV show Starsky and Hutch, episodes of the original Star Trek series,1940s- and 1950s-era Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons, movies set in Las Vegas, and 1970s East-meets-West style Kung Fu films, the McCoys create classification systems for narrative material. They reorganize the linear progression of already-produced narrative into the atemporal spread of databases. For example, Every Anvil (2001) creates a taxonomy of cartoon violence: the artists sorted through hours of early Looney Tunes footage and meticulously re-arranged it by type. The work takes the form of an open suitcase hanging on the wall with a small video monitor and a VideoCD player set inside. Nearby is a shelf loaded with CD's containing the results of their effort, labeled “EVERY HAMMER AND HATCHET,” “EVERY MEAN DOG,” “EVERY POISONING,” and so on. The viewer is encouraged to play a CD at random, and each contains nothing more than a cascade of clips showing whatever the label describes.

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