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TechArt II
April 15–May 29, 2005
Opening Reception: April 15, 6 to 8 pm
Juror—Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan explores human relationships to everyday technology in her interactive media projects. Exhibitions include Whitney Biennial (2002), the Guggenheim Museum (2004), SIGGRAPH, and Ars Electronica. She has published many articles about computer gaming culture in books and academic journals. Books include Reload: Rethinking Women +` Cyberculture (MIT Press 2002), The Sims: Similarities, Symbols & Simulacra (2003)
with Matteo Bittanti (in Italian), and Reskin (forthcoming 2005). She is the creator of The Adventures of Josie True, the first net-based adventure game for girls, and is co-director for Rapunsel, a research project to teach girls programming. http://www.maryflanagan.com.
TechArt II Juror's Statement
Art and technology exhibitions are not new phenomena. Curator Jaisia
Reichardt put together a show of computers and the arts called
"Cybernetic Serendipity" at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London
as early as 1968. The goal of the exhibition was to show how creative
people "can use the computer and new technology" to extend their
"creativity and inventiveness." Since then, countless shows dedicated to
art and technology have emerged: Ars Electronica, etc. Art and
technology works, however, have had slow acceptance into more
traditional arts fields and exhibition venues. This is why the creation
of the TechArt ongoing exhibition series in conjunction with the Boston
Cyberarts Festival proves to be a vital source of new ideas about
technologically-informed creative work.
Some of the themes which emerge in TechArt II are recurring: computer
paintings, computer films, machines and environments, and computational
architectures were all themes in Reichardt's visionary exhibition nearly
forty years ago. Undoubtedly the TechArtII exhibition features fine
models of this work. The delicate balance of machine and environment is
exemplified by several of the pieces in the show. Artist Andrew
Neumann's series of performative sculptural objects in the exhibition
examines an aspect of digital culture using its own tools: the miniature
camera, the power supply fan, and the simple "wipe" effect used in the
pieces respectively function to bridge the concrete and the abstract,
the object and the virtual object. We are pleased to include
robot-and-artist-created paintings which follow in the tradition of
Japanese Gutai artist Akira Kayanama and his " Remote Control Painting"
(1955), or Harold Cohen's "AARON" (1972).
TechArtII features several experiments with architecture brought about
by vector graphics and the reinterpretation of space, the ability to
challenge the act of mapping real spaces with virtual tools by Maine
artists, and the power in the repetition and reconstruction of familiar
objects such as suburban houses. The artifacts of digital image
processing, pushed to aesthetic and legible limits in the work of Curtis
Canham, provide another link to computer art's roots and the process of
creating an image using computational tools.
New themes have emerged, however, which expand the investigation of
computational processes in new directions. The strengths of this show
lie in the prevalence of "in-between" works-- those difficult to
classify pieces which function to extend inventive approaches to art to
include computer culture itself.
Harris and Herrera's fantasy images question and problematize the limits
of the human body as digital technology becomes closer and closer to the
skin. Max Kazemzadeh's "Target Audience" work pushes the imprecise
boundary between interactive toys and the very real danger of guns,
putting participants in the uncomfortable position of being
"shot"-through video, and through the aim of the firearm interface,
implicating both surveillance culture as well as first person shooter
games in creating this particular subject position.
Artist Meggan Gould received top honors at this year's show. Using the
internet search engine tool Google as a "cultural compiler," Gould
hunted down scores of images of the Mona Lisa and other figures and
compiled each into one layered image to create the "Google" series. The
focus not only on the computational process of merging the found images,
but on computer culture as well, marks the work as significant. Gould's
technique marks a new and vibrant way computational art has changed from
its early years to include the collective cultural and social
impressions with the immediacy that only computer networks can bring us.
The most compelling of artworks can raise questions about fundamental
aspects of the human condition. In a time of major technological shifts,
the artists in TechArtII are engaged with the ways in which technology
enters and indeed, shapes our lives.
I hope you enjoy this year's show and hope visitors might read the works
as part of an important and exciting continuum in contemporary art.
--mary flanagan march 2005
This exhibition is being held in conjunction with the Boston CyberArts
Festival.
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