About

Chicago based multimedia artist, Paul Crisanti attended the American Academy of Art and holds an art teaching degree, but is largely self taught, learning through doing, intuition and in collaborations with fellow creatives and peers.

The use of photography, video, sound, sculpture and the written word, all serve as tools for his investigations concerning the nature of self, time and notions of reality. Much of the his work has a humorous and ironic aspect to it.

While Cogitation & Depictions represents his most recent work, another example can be found in his last project “I’m not here right now”. In this online piece, Crisanti organized his archived collection of tape recorded phone answering machine messages left on his machine from 1984 to 1996, until the device finally broke.

It is an early record of our use of technology to record, preserve and time-shift the everyday communication that conversation once provided.

This was the first machine to allow us the option of selecting a more “convenient” listening time.

It also represents the beginning of the disconnection we currently experience with our fellow humans.

It is now the machine who speaks for us and to us.