Series: Art
Exhibition
Reception Date: Friday, March 18
Time: 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: March 18 - April
16
Venue: Visual
Arts Building, Main Gallery
Subrealities Website: subrealities.utdinteractive.net
Ticket
Prices: Free admission
LECTURES:
Lev Manovich
April 6, 7 p.m., Jonsson Performance
Hall, free
One of today's most influential thinkers
in the fields of media arts and digital
culture. His book, The Language of New
Media, has been described by reviewers
as "the most suggestive and broad ranging
media history since Marshall McLuhan"
and "the first rigorous and far-reaching
theorization of new media."
Natalie
Bookchin
April
13, 7 p.m., Jonsson Performance Hall, free
Natalie Bookchin is a leading Internet
artist, Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and
creator of online games such as Metapet
and agoraXchange. Reviewers place Bookchin’s
work in the larger context of social engagement,
“For Bookchin...art is literally action—making
things happen, one way or the other.”
|
|
|
Subrealities will be
presented online at subrealities.utdinteractive.net.
The exhibition explores virtual spaces that
present alternatives to existing museum/gallery
structures as well as a counterpoint to
the dominant commercial voices of corporate
media. It brings together artists David
Crawford, Sharon Daniel, John Freyer, Peter
Horvath, Annette Weintraub, and Johannes
Weymann to examine new methods of generating
and distributing narrative through the use
of digital media.
Distributed.Nerves
Running concurrently with subrealities,
Distributed.Nerves presents the next generation
of digital art from students in the Art
and Technology Program at UTD. While relying
upon computer processes or the digital alteration
of imagery, these young artists engage in
a dialogue with familiar forms such as photography,
video, painting, and installation. The U.T.
Dallas students participating in the exhibition
include Kelly Brown, Will Dooley, Megan
Foreman, Beverly Grose, Don Huff, Sara Ishii,
Cynthia Parry, Jeff Senita, and Amber Wigant.
|
Submission | Submersion | Time
“One does not establish a dictatorship
in order to safeguard a revolution,” George
Orwell wrote, rather “one makes a revolution
in order to establish a dictatorship”.
The waves of Internet and digital “revolutions”
that are combinations of genuine change and well
financed marketing hype offer not only possibilities
for new forms of expression but also new forms
of control. Successfully negotiating the barriers
demands submerging one’s self beneath structures
that define the context of creative manifestation.
And part of this submersion includes redefining
what digital time feels like. Though measured
precisely, digital time can become more like lived
time: indefinite, shifting, and variable.
The technologies that form the distributed experience
mediated by the internet, software, and hardware
form a commercial matrix of technologies that
function effectively as an authoritarian regime
of method. Students, especially, are forced into
particular patterns of action and behavior. They
adopt software designer’s ideas about what
“editing” and “selecting”
and “compositing” mean, and learn
in the maniacally compressed duration of computer
or “Internet time.”
Hence many of the problems encountered by young
artists are the same ones that afflict content
and expression of all kinds that has become digital.
Mismatched ideas about property and uniqueness
and place continue to slow the growth of our understanding
of art and digital gestures that have become relational
and distributed across multiple spaces and times.
Where the “art” is often what is in
between objects, rather than the objects themselves;
a perception of passing rather than an observation
of particularity.
The openings in the wired and wireless array
of evolving technology are many. Video can be
further extracted from its linear bindings. Text
can become more image-like, fluid, and unstable
as it exists in our thoughts. Time can be reconstructed
based on personal and shared context, rather than
the demands of commerce.
Most time spent on computers is regulated, observed,
mechanical, and highly specific. Computer mediated
arts should free us from this delineated time
and place us in the unspecified duration of lived
experience. The felt time of Henri Bergson’s
duree where the oppression of mechanical time
is replaced by the possibilities of freedom and
authenticity of despatialized time.
In that place/time, the clocks on our metaphorical
desktop disappear, the email is forgotten, the
to-do reminders never pop up, and we are allowed
to flow uninterrupted into authored experience,
rather than fragmented among pragmatic tasks.
We submerge ourselves beneath them.
And before they can rise above, these new artists
must dig down, deep, underneath assumptions about
what art practice and experience is. To “go
under” as Nietzsche insists. The inherited
reality needs to be dug up, gone under, with the
artist subsumed, submerged, creating, as we have
here, an matrix of subrealities.
Dean Terry, March, 2005
|
by Peter Horvath
art by Amber Wigant,
graduate student
by Sharon Daniel
by John Freyer
by David Crawford
by Annette Weintraub
|
