Remapped Realities at Eyebeam

Artists Exhibiting in Remapped Realities at Eyebeam:

Eyebeam is an appropriate place for a video installation exhibit because they have the space to contain all the pieces and have them exist independently of each other, without the accidental influence that other video installation exhibits tend to have when they are installed in a limited space. Eyebeam installed each of the pieces in Remapped Realities in their own room, and all the pieces sounds were self-contained, there wasn't much sound leaking from one piece into another. All of the pieces addressed very different ideas and each had their own individual techniques. There wasn't the problem that plauges many installations where the videos all have such a similar aesthetic that the work seems to be produced by the same artist even though they were produced by individual artists.

Aziz + Cucher - Synaptic Bliss: Villette
At first this piece didn't strike me as quickly as Caspar Stracke's piece, because its nature does not provoke an immediate response. Sitting through the piece and experiencing its progression is this piece's strength. The forms of Syaptic Bliss resemble that of cells and the shift in seasons. The masking and composition of the piece is very smooth and the progressions are very dynamic.


Michele Barker - Struck
This was a narrative piece about "understanding disease through the visual interpretation of data" (Eyebeam.org, 2005) in the context of a woman waking up in another woman's body. This piece did not draw me in so much because I didn't find the presentation of form and narrative very persuasive. The rendering of the text for the narrative from blurry to readable seemed too obvious and created an unnecessarily slow pace.

Andreas Berner - Moments

The scenes in this piece reminded me of the Little Prince, the notion of a character exploring his environment and contemplating memories.


Bret McConnell - The Jonses
I felt like this work was overshadowed by all the other pieces because of its obvious nature. It didn't unfold or exhibit a multi-layered process like the rest of the work, and it was installed in hallways on the way to other pieces, which made these pieces missable.


Shirin Neshat - Making of Mahdokht
A documentary about Neshat's first feature film "Women Without Men," based on a novel written by an Iranian writer, Shahrnoush Parsipour. This video piece was a film of a film being made, a meta-narrative of sorts. The scene in the image above, is one of the most striking scenes in the piece, wherein a woman is sitting on the ground in a forest knitting amongst a huge pile of yellow yarn.

Caspar Stracke - P.O.P.
P.O.P stands for Points of Presence, a video installation mounted on a rotating hangar wherein both sides of the screen had projections of transposition of New York, Mexico City, Berlin and Shanghai. Each scene of video from a specific city would eventually be spliced by another scene from another city, producing a flow of elements of familiarity from similar elements of the cities. This piece demonstrates ideas of the life and premise of capitalistic development of cities from the book Mutations, which I am currently reading and did buy at the Remapped Realities exhibition.

greater ny 2005 at ps1

Last Saturday I went to the P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, which is an affiliate of MOMA NY. The current exhibit, "Greater NY 2005" consists of work selected by a group of curators who sifted through applicants that responded to the open call for the exhibit. Over 160 artists were selected, and their names can be seen on the recently poorly re-designed P.S.1 website The list of artist names is static, but when you click on their names, nothing happens. The only way to see the artwork by the list of names featured is to sit through a flash slideshow that has no user control, very circa 1998.

Any art survey is always met with a variety of debate and complaints. The Brainstormers who formed together to (text from their site)

BRAINSTORMERS HISTORY:

On a dark and stormy night in DUMBO, a group of emerging women artists joined powers to combat gender inequality in the artworld.

Outraged by the circulating rumors concerning the numbers of women artists included in the 2nd Greater New York Exhibition at PS1, they were inspired to research the real numbers. What they found confirmed that women artists are STILL being silenced by curators and dealers in the public sector. As artists who want to see the true discourse and exchange of ideas reflected in the public sphere, they will confront this ongoing curatorial catastrophe until its end.

Founders Maria Dumlao, Jane Johnston, Elaine Kaufmann, and Danielle Mysliwiec are all recent graduates of the Hunter College MFA program.

The Brainstormers staged a protest regarding the lack of the representation women artists at the Greater NY 2005 exhibit at P.S.1.



P.S.1 released the ratio of male to female artists featured at the exhibit, which was 100 men and 50 women. On the Brainstormer site they have pictures of the curators of the exhibition and a caption surrounding their images:



Along with the Brainstormer protest regarding the P.S.1 exhibition is a fake press release about the Greater New York exhibit that was being circulated. The text of the document presented ideas such as the provision of an artist union as well as representation from people of various demographics in New York City. The text is essentially a critique of the issues surrounding the exhibition cloaked in the form of an offical looking P.S.1 press release, an impressive piece of social engineering.

Artists and their work that caught my attention from the Greater NY exhibit:

Kent Henricksen


-Various pieces: Embroidered masks and ropes on the characters of old embroidery pieces, commenting on the alteration of art that revealed genitalia and other censored parts of the body

Ian Burns
-The Epic Tour: an interactive wooden piece, wherein the viewer rides a cart that is built on a train track. The cart stops at sections of the piece where various scenes are played out. The paper installed on the side of the cart acts like a screen, enabling the shadows of the various scenes to glimpsed by the viewer as they ride around the piece. This was the most engaging piece in the exhibition because not only could a viewer actually insert themselves in the piece by riding the cart, but the other viewers that come into the room where the piece is installed actually follow the cart that the viewer is in and try to see what the rider is seeing. The piece is itself providing and directing the movement of the viewers, which no other piece did in the exhibition.

I could not find an accessible site pertaining to his work with the exception of a sparse listing which is unfortunate, since he created the most dynamic piece at the Greater NY exhibition. The aforementioned link does provide somewhat of an idea regarding the look of and feel of The Epic Tour.

Yuken Teruya




These pieces were NOT as P.S.1, I have merely posted them as examples of what the work resembled. The tree pieces exhibited at P.S.1 were crafted with more detail.
-Various pieces: Shopping bags from iconic botiques/department stores that have their fronts cut up into the shape of trees that are contained in the shopping bags at a vertical angle. These pieces are delicate and meticulously produced dioramas with the use of one material (the shopping bag).

David Moreno
-Stereoma: Two circular speaker tweeters mounted on thin metal posts that moved according to the audio that it transmitted from a receive

I found absolutely nothing on the web for this artist.

Kirsten Hassenfeld





These pieces were NOT at P.S.1 I am using them as examples of the nature of her work.

-Sweet Nothing: a work primarily composed of paper productions of gems, cakes and ornate objects that are otherwise made of hard and heavy material. Interesting ideas of the portrayal of valuable/heirloom/luxurious objects, all rendered in paper form.

The only digital media piece that provided any intriguing concepts and that was technically sound was a piece entitled Dark Sun Squeeze by Pavel Wojtasik



stills from Dark Sun Squeeze

which was a visual study of a sewage plant. Each scene was a close up of the various stages of the processing in a sewage plant for reuse. Even though the thought of what was being shot was repulsive, the shots were paced at a slow rate and each scene progressed as elegant and geometric shots of waste and its transformation into product. The installation of the piece was in a room wherein the only other piece was another video piece that just showed a rotating black globe with the only visible country being the United States which was a an irritatingly obvious piece, so as a viewer, you could not help but associate both video pieces together, which detracted from the value of the Dark Sun Squeeze piece in the context of how the work was installed.

I am curious as to why there was no digital interactive work at the Greater NY exhibit. The majority of work was that of traditional media: drawing, painting, and sculpture. Were there no applicants that demonstrated enough skill in digital interactive arts to have their work to be shown? Or did the curators of Greater NY just not consider digital art (with the exception of video) representative of the cross section of emerging artists with talent in New York City?

data as image

I used the rhizome.org member curation tool to create this exhibit i named "data as image." you have to be a member of rhizome.org to create a member curated exhibit, but it is a good tool for exploring rhizome's database as well as for learning how to think about curatorial practices, digital preservation and access to new media work.

These works explore the concept of data as image. These pieces provide a conceptual framework for visualizing statistics with the use of representational formats that have not been traditonally used for art making.

tim hawkinson

Went to the Tim Hawkinson Retrospective at the Whitney
last Saturday, March 12, 2005.

His body of work is impressive not only because of the technique of the production of his sculptures, which are mostly kinetic and analog-but also because his work ranges in scale from tiny fingernail sculptures


left: EGG, 1997
Finely ground fingernails and hair, super glue 1x1.5x1 in.

right: BIRD, 1997
Fingernails and super glue 2x2x1.75 in.

to large scale pieces such as his kinetic self portrait




Each plastic piece of his face is controlled by a motor. The result is an organically dynamic self-portrait.

Emotor (detail), 2001
Mixed media: image, 49 x 36 x 4 inches; ladder, 27 x 24 x 19 inches; cable, 174 feet



Pentecost, 1999 (detail)
Polyurethane foam, sonotubes, solenoids, found computer program, and mechanical components
Dimensions variable
Andrea Nasher Collection

Description from the Whitney:
Twelve figures based on the Bathtub-Generated Contour Lace pattern were suspended within the branches of a tree composed of cardboard tubes covered with wooden-deck rubbings (Crow’s Nest). Each figure taps with a different part of his body on a branch of the tree. Syncopated, rhythmic patterns are generated by a found computer program.



Untitled, 2003 (detail)
Ink-jet prints on foam core on panel
68 x 117 (172.7 x 297.2)
Private collection; courtesy Ace Gallery

Description from the Whitney:
Hands, photographed in different positions, sprout from the fingertips of larger hands, which sprout from larger hands, repeating for five generations
of hands from fingers.

This piece is a fractal of hands. The hands sprouting from hands sprouting from hands is essentially an iteration.


Signature, 1993
School desk, paper, wood, and metal; motorized
37 x 28 x 24 (94 x 71.1 x 61)
Collection of Tony Krantz

Description from the Whitney:
A machine that signs my name onto a roll of paper, chops it off, and drops it into a pile.

The signature produced by this machine is very realistic, if you were to see one of the signatures on a piece of paper, you would not know that it was produced by a machine. The fact that the machine is mounted underneath a one armed school desk might suggest the repetitiveness of penmanship exercises in school.

Uber Organ is currently on display at The Sculpture Garden, at 590 Madison Avenue at 56th Street



Uber Organ is a large scale sculpture that plays a musical score via plastic pipes that are resemble internal organs.

Hawkinson's work, which is a fusion of organic sculpture with analog machinery results in work that plays with ideas of sculpture and machine as it relates to the human body. The subject matter of his work is not preachy and doesn't seem like it takes itself too seriously as a lot of artwork tends to do. Tim Hawkinson's work is that rare combination of technical and conceptual.

spaces

These structures are by architect Zaha Hadid








Bergisel Ski Jump

She is one of my favorite architects because of her use of dramatic angles in her structures. Her structures are prominent without being overbearing.

Doughnut Plant

Doughnut Plant is a really great donught bakery in the Lower East Side. They use organic ingredients in their doughnuts which are made fresh everyday. They don't taste like a tasteless empty dried boxed doughnut. I tried one of their jelly doughnuts today, and even though I was expecting a huge mass of jelly embedded in the doughnut it was actually a pleasant and light raspberry jam, which perfectly complemented the vanilla glaze on the exterior of the doughnut. There is not much in the neighborhood except low income housing, but the doughnuts are definitely worth the trek.