Nathan Hess

Work from Craft is Caring

“During my childhood, knot tying was almost an object of folklore. I grew up in an industrious and old-fashioned town of 800. Despite the setting, knot tying as a craft unto itself was already a relic of previous generations. While it was required knowledge for my Grandfather, it now holds the aura of a dead language. This series is a simple but wholehearted attempt at layering a disappearing art with an emerging art, juxtaposing two seemingly disparate but closely related methods of fabrication.” – Nathan Hess

Clement Valla

Work from Bridges.

“My work focuses on socio-technical systems that raise a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. I explore digital technologies that are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things but that also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiples. I treat existing artifacts, existing site conditions, market relationships, or networked and collaborative systems as programmable systems, using simple algorithmic methods: copying, repetition, iteration. When my programs run their course, inherent contradictions and absurd situations result from the very structure of the system itself, producing unfamiliar artifacts and juxtapositions.
Like an anamorphic projection, my programs produce distortions that reveal their own underlying logic, but also point to the system as it functions when we fail to notice it- when it works conventionally.” – Clement Villa

Jason Huff

Work from AutoSummarize and The Story of Art.

Huff is showing in .gif .jpg .png .tif tomorrow night at HERE – 145 Sixth Avenue (entrance on Dominick St., one block South of Spring St.). Check it out – Thursday, March 3, 5-7PM.

“In the midst of the Internet excitement over the meme “I Write Like,” (does it really work? What’s the algorithm? Why does everyone end up writing like Stephen King?), the literary blog “The Valve” pointed to a another fun combination of computers and literature.

For his “Auto Summarize” project, the graphic designer Jason Huff took the one hundred most downloaded copyright-free books and reduced them each by ten sentences with Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize function. The result is absurd and also quite funny.

…

Is there really anything else?

The past year or so has brought a few technological reworkings of great books. Sarah Schmelling transposed classics into Facebook pages (her “Hamlet” newsfeed can be read here). Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman, both students at the University of Chicago, did the same with Twitter. For me, the humor in this kind of retelling always comes from hearing a recognizable tale in a modern, clipped voice. I like how Hamlet becomes “a fan of daggers” on Facebook and takes the time to tweet “Uncle just confessed to Dad’s murder.” The projects always come with an ominous undertone, though. Is this how the students of the future will read Shakespeare?” – Madeleine Schwartz

Molly Dilworth

Work from Paintings for Satellites

“I have an inclination to work with materials that have had an obvious life before I use them; it’s a challenge and a pleasure to make something from nothing.

Amie Siegel

Work from Black Moon.

“The centerpiece of this three-part work is “Black Moon,” a partial remaking of Louis Malle’s 1975 film of the same title. A present-day science-fiction without dialogue, Siegel’s “Black Moon” traverses multiple film tropes – action, guns, lonely campfires, the end of the world – and, like its band of armed female revolutionaries, resists taking up residence in a fixed genre or narrative. Set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of foreclosed housing developments in Florida and California, the houses and empty streets become protagonists of a silent narrative, a documentary of the recent past. A highly stylized troop of female soldiers wanders through the abandoned environments, pushed on by gunfire and the bloody aftermath of battles. “Black Moon” conjures references to wars ‘here and elsewhere,’ suggesting alternate endings to the mythical domestic return of US troops from campaigns abroad, pondering the places soldiers protect, and the parallel economies of gender, images, and warfare. The film’s deliberate pacing, juxtaposing scenes of the armed women with fixed camera tableaux and tracking shots of the empty architecture of financial speculation, ponders the uncannily recent ruins of a future that never was.

The second element is a series of photographs, “Black Moon / Hole Punches”, derived from the hole punches, or black moons, typically cut by the motion picture laboratory into the first frame of action in film negative. Always left out of the final edited film, these hole punches appear in Siegel’s prints as imperfect black disks or voids cut out of film frames. They are evocative of lunar phases, yet strangely violent in their intercession into the otherwise smooth picture plane. As metaphors of the filmic endeavor itself, the set of images expose the film’s own production in a fragmentary manner, while re-capitulating its latent violence and re-use of aesthetic ruins.

The third element is “Black Moon / Mirrored Malle,” a 2-channel video installation that places an original 1975 interview with Louis Malle about his film “Black Moon” against a shot-for-shot version in which the artist herself plays Malle. This shift of roles introduces a transposition of gender and language, enacting a battle of authorship and doubled future within the present.” – Amie Siegel

Aram Bartholl

Work from Map

“The project ‘Map’ is a public space installation questioning the red map marker of the location based search engine Google Maps. “Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.” With a small graphic icon Google marks search results in the map interface. The design of the virtual map pin seems to be derived from a physical map needle. On one hand the marker and information speech bubble next to it cast a shadow on the digital map as if they were physical objects. When the map is switched to satellite mode it seems that they become part of the city. On the other hand it is a simple 20 px graphic icon which stays always at the same size on the computer screen. The size of the life size red marker in physical space corresponds to the size of a marker in the web interface in maximal zoom factor of the map. Where is the center of a city?

In the city center series ‘Map’ is set up at the exact spot where Google Maps assumes to be the city center of the city. Transferred to physical space the map marker questions the relation of the digital information space to every day life public city space. The perception of the city is increasingly influenced by geolocation services.” – Aram Bartholl

Stefan Panhans

Work from Items for Possible Videosets.

“Stefan Panhans also concentrates in his works on everyday phenomena, even though, with another emphasize: His videos and photographs analyse the spectacle of increasing commercialisation and staging of urban spaces and reflects on the people’s searching for role models within these situations. In his photographic work, Panhans uses different strategies in parallel. Ranging from spontaneous photographs to the addition of objects in found situations to entirely composed pictures, he creates new compositions related to the context.” – Kunstverein Hargurger Bahnhof.

Zach Gage

Work from Data.

“With my installation, Data, I explore a number of discrepancies surrounding our use of data, and how that use is, or could be, shaping our lives for the better or worse.

As a society, we are in a transitional time where we are no longer packing our memories into cardboard boxes, instead putting all of that content into digital “boxes”. We do this despite having a limited understanding of how these new “boxes” work. This makes it difficult to keep track of such previously simple concepts as where our things are going, how we can use them, or even how long they will exist.

We are thrilled to have digital photos, digital music, and correspondence through email, but we don’t usually realize the value of these pieces of data until they are lost to us. In the physical world we take steps to protect this kind of information, putting it in photo albums or treasure boxes and treating those containers carefully. In the virtual space however, we often don’t take any steps to protect these most valued possessions.

We are so excited to have infinite access to information, that we often choose to search for something over and over again, assuming it will always be there online, rather than save, or even bookmark it.

We love sharing our information with others publicly, yet when it comes back to haunt us weeks or years later we are upset and surprised.

We lament how the popular gain power, and then choose to make popularity the strongest metric of success in a new environment.

And most importantly, we store our collective memory online, and reference it often, without asking how it can enrich our lives beyond convenience.” – Zach Gage

Gareth Spor

Work from his oeuvre.

“Often fixating on the physics of light, the cosmos, and the geometries of space and time, I work across a diverse range of media to explore the states of wonderment achieved when people contemplate things larger than themselves. My work is a means to feed my own curiosity and to share some of the wonderment I feel with others.” – Gareth Spor

via Zero 1

Sara Ludy

Work from her oeuvre.

“A growing trend within certain net art circles is investigating the processes involved in translating landscapes and nature onto and within digital frameworks. Sara Ludy should be considered as one of the more creative practitioners of this type of adaptation amongst this camp of makers. Her diverse work speaks to how space (and it’s psychological affects) operate in network culture. The combination of photography, collage, live performance, video, and music all interweave into an intricate and sublime web of gestures that challenge how we interact and present nature online.

Ludy largely plays with the tension found between using digital and analogue devices. She will compose a collage and or animation through software and then re-record or document these works through analog video of traditional darkroom photography. This experimentation with material creates a traceable dance with objects and their representation, blurring the lines of how one distinguishes the difference between the artificial and the organic…” – excerpt from Nicholas O’Brien