Anthony Discenza
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
2012
In Anthony Discenza’s 23-minute audio loop that makes up A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats, a nondescript male voice narrates a series of unlikely pairings: “think Dune meets South Pacific;” “think dubstep meets the Magna Carta;” “think the Food Network meets Igmar Bergman.” Given without inflection or emotion, this recitation uses the structure of a Hollywood elevator pitch to sketch out an unknown project, idea, or structure, conflating and collapsing cultural referents into an implausible mass of contradictions.
Since the late 1990s Anthony Discenza's work has focused primarily on the omnipresence of mainstream media. In addition to his personal work, he devotes a great deal of time to HalfLifers, an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist Torsten Z. Burns.