Artist as Prisoner

The images would have become something completely different in the Totem and Taboo project, according to Bobb. He is adamant that no image would have been recognizable as child pornography. (In fact government prosecutors acknowledged during the trial that investigators found on Bobb's computers altered images of child pornography fitting the artist's description of "video painting.") Bobb says he had envisioned multiple channels of video on twelve monitors. There would be strobe lighting and audio from the 60 Minutes show that featured one girl describing how her stepbrothers had tried to rape her. The audio would trigger melodic tones, making something horrific vaguely pleasant.

Sitting at a table surrounded by orange traffic cones on a brick-paved street in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, Gustavo Matamoros is oblivious to the cars that occasionally rattle by. As he taps on his laptop's keyboard, a massive image of two cigars -- or perhaps one cigar burning from both ends -- is projected onto more than a dozen scrim fabric screens hung from an old building's brick archways. Four large hidden speakers cast disembodied sounds -- bird calls maybe, something akin to an electronic dog yelping, lobotomized chicken clucks -- that echo off the brick faades on the block.

Several passersby, elderly white tourists with digital cameras dangling from their necks and middle-age black women out for an evening on the town, stop to look and listen. One heavyset lady turns to her girlfriends and asks loudly: "This a haunted house?" The audience, a group of about twenty -- dotted with black frame glasses and artsy tattoos -- smoke cigarettes on the curb, chat quietly, and check cell phone screens. Some listen intently. A young man wearing a blue blazer pauses to take in the scene. He turns to someone leaning against a wall. "Is this art or something?" he asks with wry smile.

The sound technician for the day, Charles Taylor, admits he was puzzled when Matamoros contacted him about setting up the sound system. Generally he does only concerts, bigger shows with one or two channels of sound, nothing like the four-channel system Matamoros wanted. "I thought he was crazy when he first called me," Taylor says. "Art? Yeah, okay, whatever, dude." Then, looking around, Taylor adds, "Am I missing something? There's nobody here."

There is a limited but devoted following for sound art, Matamoros says after the performance. Because the South Florida scene is small compared to New York or other major cities, there is more freedom to invent, he explains in a thick Venezuelan accent. "What Ed does and what I do is Miami music, whether people know it or not. Cuban music is Cuban music, not Miami music."

Before his arrest, Bobb sometimes would show up an hour before a performance with nothing prepared, Matamoros explains. He would spend time at his computer thinking about how to tailor the sound to the space. In a recent video piece titled Mandala, Bobb interspersed rapid-fire images of single flowers with dull urban street scenes so that the flowers morphed into kaleidoscopic fireworks. Bobb often layered sounds and pop-culture flotsam such as TV commercials, newscasts, and religious programs. In his apartment-cum-studio he stored a massive archive of videotapes, DVDs, and CDs that included everything from mundane government meetings to ridiculous Japanese pop songs.

Matamoros says Bobb had never spoken with him about child pornography or the Totem and Taboo project, so he was puzzled by news of the charges against his longtime colleague. "I think he may have been naive, but I have a hard time believing there was any malice," Matamoros says. "For me, an artist is someone who investigates. There's the need for the artist to go into a subject equally as a scientist goes into a subject."

Bobb never goes into a subject hesitantly, Matamoros adds. "It's always about extending things. He's interested in the edge. It's not very interesting if you can go 200 miles per hour in a Ferrari. What would be interesting is if you could go 200 miles per hour on a Vespa."

Bobb's style didn't sit well with everyone. Zach Danesh, a 21-year-old artist, recalls taking an art survey class alongside Bobb at the New World School of the Arts. Bobb was studying for his master's -- he had taught film studies at Miami-Dade Community College until the degree was made mandatory for professors. "A lot of the other kids in class didn't like him," Danesh says. They thought he was pretentious, overly cynical, impossible to please.