Boston Cyberarts Inc.

141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. Located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line. 617-524-2109

Poetic Codings

April 27-June 2, 2013

An exhibition of projections and iPad apps

organized by Jody Zellen

Online Catalog

Rafael Rozendaal, Hybrid Moment

BOSTON -The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is pleased to present Poetic Codings, straight from its premiere exhibition at the Fellows of Contemporary Art gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes three projections by John Carpenter, Casey Reas and Jeremy Rotsztain as well as 20 original, interactive iPad artworks by 8 artists including John Baldessari, Jason Lewis, Lia, Erik Loyer, Jeremy Rotsztain, Rafaël Rozendaal, Scott Snibbe and Jody Zellen.

This exhibition includes computer projections by three of the finest new media artists on the West Coast. In the wonderfully interactive Dandelion Clock by John Carpenter, the viewer’s proximity blows the seeds of a digitally created dandelion about the wall. Jeremy Rotsztain’s Action Painting is a video projection transferred onto a large canvas in the style of Jackson Pollock. It is composed using data from action movies as material. Casey Reas, one of the inventors of Processing (a computer language for artists), presents Signal to Noise (Software 1), which uses television signals as a raw material distorting contemporary information into new abstract data structures.

Since the introduction of the iPhone, new media artists have produced a wealth of interactive art for both iOS and Android systems. These are the most inventive and interactive art works available today. All of the apps are low cost, and many of them are even free. Even though several of these apps have become wildly popular, it is clear that neither the art world nor the computer industry knows what to make of these art apps. This exhibition is one of the first to juxtapose wall-based works with those made for mobile devices and is the first exhibition of its kind in New England.

In searching the iTunes store for “art apps” it is possible to find draw and paint apps, however, all of the apps in this show are listed in iTunes under Entertainment or Lifestyle ­- so there is no way to find this work on iTunes without knowing exactly what it is you’re looking for. Confusion doesn’t stop success; Scott Snibbe’s Gravilux came out on May 15, 2010 and was instantly ranked 1 in Entertainment and 2 in all apps. It stayed in the top 100 in Entertainment for 6 months and regularly returned there for more than a year. Even an obscure art history related work, John Baldessari’s In Still Life 2001-2010, debuted in the top 100 in Entertainment on June 22, 2010 and stayed there for a week. These 20 apps are the beginning of a revolution bringing inexpensive, interactive digital art to millions through their smart devices and connecting artists directly to an audience through an app store. The art world should take notice.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

John Carpenter is an interactive digital artist and designer whose work explores natural systems and complex data and spaces. Based in Los Angeles, he works for Oblong Industries as a g-speak engineer and is a visiting professor in the Multimedia Arts Department at Loyola Marymount University. John earned his MFA from the department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA (2009) and has recently exhibited work at the 84th Annual Academy Awards, Young Projects and ACME.

Casey Reas is an artist whose conceptual and minimal works explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas’s software and images derive from short text instructions explaining processes that define networks.

Jeremy Rotsztain is a Portland, Oregon-based digital artist who, taking cues from the practice of painting, works with movies, images, and sound as a kind of malleable and expressive material. In his work, popular narratives, pixels, and sound bites are sampled, transformed, re-arranged and composed in an effort to examine the language and patterns of contemporary media and the shared cultural experiences that we have with them.

John Baldessari, born in National City, California in 1931, is an artist whose innovative combination of text and image, along with his witty, rigorous approach to teaching, has influenced generations of artists. In more than 200 solo exhibitions and numerous books, films, videos and public works, John Baldessari has continually poked holes in the boundaries of art, slyly and confidently asking questions about life, pictures and language. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

Jason Lewis is a digital artist and technology researcher whose work revolves around experiments in visual language, text and typography. His other interests include computation as a creative material, emergent media theory and history, and methodologies for conducting art-led technology research

The Austrian artist LIA – one of the early pioneers of Software and Net Art – has been creating digital art, installations and sound works since 1995. Her Internet works combine various traditions of drawing and painting with the aesthetic of digital images and algorithms. They are characterized by a minimalist quality, and by an affinity with conceptual art.

Erik Loyer uses tactile, performative and musical interfaces to tell stories, combining elements drawn from video games and comic books with dynamic typography, gestural control, and synaesthetics.

Rafaël Rozendaal is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. His artistic practice consists of websites, installations, drawings, writings and lectures. Spread out over a vast network of domain names, he attracts a large online audience of over 25 million visits per year.

Scott Snibbe is an interactive media artist, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is one of the first artists to work with projectorbased interactivity, where a computer-controlled projection onto a wall or floor changes in response to people moving across its surface.

Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist, writer and curator who works in many media simultaneously, making interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artists’ books. She employs media generated representations as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations that combine text and image.

The Game’s Afoot: Video Game Art

curated by George Fifield

Opening reception Friday, March 15, 2013 6-9pm

“Into the Void” by Anthony Montuori

BOSTON –The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is pleased to present The Game’s Afoot: Video Game Art. Three artists who make video games that investigate the nature of art as well as the nature of video games themselves will be on view at The Boston Cyberarts Gallery from Saturday March 2 through Sunday April 14. This exhibition coincides with the PAX East Convention at the Boston Convention Center, at which Boston Cyberarts is also programming the 80 foot LED Marquee with art by Massachusetts Video Game designers and teachers.

Artists in the exhibition include Rob Gonsalves, Victor Liu and Anthony Montuori.

Rob Gonsalves’ O.f.f.i.c.e.A.n.t.s. is a ten-letter-acronym for Organized, Fast, Frantic, Intelligent, Corporate Entities Acting in a Novel Technology Simulation. The worker ants are developers, drones who perform repetitive tasks. You can interact with the O.f.f.i.c.e A.n.t.s. by using the two small canisters of developer nourishment, Pizza Bits and Coda Cola. Campaign Horse is a modified version of the basketball game “HORSE.” Using insults heard during recent political campaigns, the player insults their opponent or “takes shots” at them. The political points are added up by the letters and, if enough damage is inflicted, your opponents credibility is called into question.

Victor Liu’s audiovisual installation, Airlock Park, is an interactive, screen-based work powered by a PlayStation 3 game machine.  Influenced both by the history of moving images as well as by the spatial dynamics of video games, this work pulls image fragments from many sources – from cinema and art history to internet video and video game footage – to construct virtual tableaux, or scenes.

Anthony Montuori’s games illuminate the futility of the modern pursuit of success. Debtris, a spinoff of “Tetris,” allows the player to pay off their insurmountable student debt playing the popular computer game for minimum wage. In Into the Void, the player becomes Yves Klein and attempts to remain in the void for as long as possible and, as in life, it is a struggle to do that. In Sisyphus, the gamer assumes the role of the Greek king and pushes a boulder upwards, to remove it from a hole in the ground. As the boulder gets closer to the top, the task becomes more difficult until the boulder falls back down again. Push, struggle, repeat forever.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Rob Gonsalves attended Northeastern University and UMass Lowell. Currently a Boston resident, he is an active member of COLLISIONcollective and works as a senior consulting engineer at Avid Technology.

Victor Liu’s has shown at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens NY, the FILE Festival in Brazil, the Microwave Festival in Singapore, the Boston Center for the Arts, among other venues. Grants and commissions include a NYFA Fellowship in Computer Arts and work commissions from Turbulence.org and the Whitney Museum’s Artport. He also served as a juror for the 2007 NYFA Computer Arts Fellowships. Liu currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Anthony Montuori is an Artist/Video Game Maker who lives and works in Boston, MA. He went to college for his Associates degree in fine arts at Hudson Valley Community, then to Montserrat College of Art for his BFA, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for his MFA.

Boston Cyberarts Gallery Presents City of Work

by Michael Lewy

curated by George Fifield

Opening reception: Friday January 11, 2013

BOSTON -The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is pleased to present City of Work, by Michael Lewy. This dystopian view of a city filled with cubicles reflects the ideas of the author of The Overworked American, Juliet Schor, who wrote that in 1990, Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970. Using photography, video, computer graphics and the Internet, Lewy has constructed an entire society where vacations are given by lottery, jobs are determined by the Human Potential Institute and it is illegal to be unemployed.

Marcus Sterling L’amour, founder and CEO of Omnipresent Industries says about the exhibition, “While we at Omnipresent Industries disapprove of art, as it represents a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves better workers, this exhibition does reflect the strong values that Omnipresent Industries stands for, our core principles that guide our decisions and actions, ensuring everything we do is beneficial to our way of life. Remember our motto “if you worked here, you would be at work right now.”"

This exhibition will include a computer based introductory orientation about your new work environment, an opportunity to take a Human Potential Institute test and find out exactly what job you will be assigned to and further inspirational quotes of Marcus Sterling L’amour.

ABOUT MICHAEL LEWY

Michael Lewy is an artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video and computer graphics. He received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1996; He has been working at MIT as an administrative assistant since 2000 and also works as an illustrator for such clients as the New York Times book review and HiLow books. He is the author of Chart Sensation, a book of power point charts and has shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Pacific Film Archives and Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston. He currently lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter. www.cityofwork.com, www.mlewy.com

COLLISION18:present

November 9-December 15, 2012

Boston Cyberarts Gallery presents its first exhibition in collaboration with the Boston based COLLISIONcollective. COLLISION18:Present, the eighteenth COLLISIONcollective group show, explores the concept of an eternal present as obtained by the use of looping media, static images, sculpture and installation. Other meanings of the word “present” are suggested: gifts to and from the artist and viewer, presentation and simple presence in a place and time. Curated by COLLISIONcollective members William Tremblay, John Slepian and Bob Kephart, COLLISION18:Present consists of 30 works by artists from the Boston area, and from across the US, France, Spain, Switzerland and Israel.

Visit: http://www.collisioncollective.org/show/collision-18 for more information.

The Frame in Contemporary New Media Art

Join us  Wednesday, May 22 at 7:30pm for an ATNE salon with ASPECT founder, Michael Mittleman.

The frame around a painting serves to indicate where the art begins and ends, and modernist painters were among the first to experiment with the mutability of that boundary.  Traditional sculpture uses a pedestal for the same purpose, but what about video art, installation, and other forms of New Media?  Michael Mittelman,  founder of ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art,  will show ways in which artists have used the concept of the frame to guide viewers.

About ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art
ASPECT is a biannual DVD periodical of contemporary new media art.  Each volume assembles individual videos directly from artists with a second audio track by a curator or art critic.  Started in 2003, ASPECT has published the works of over 200 artists from 20 countries.  Recognized around the world as the premier journal of contemporary New Media Art , ASPECT is used widely in universities and cited by artists, teachers and curators. ASPECT is available as a DVD, an iPad app and streaming online.  http://www.aspectmag.org/.

About the Presenter
Michael Mittelman has been working at the intersection of art and technology for over twenty years.  In college he studied architecture and theater, with a thesis project on expressing human emotion through 3d models on the web, using the then cutting edge technology: VRML.   After several years as a technology consultant, he returned to academia and received an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and subsequently taught at MassArt and Emerson College.  Seeing an enormous need for broader access to documentation and commentary of time-based art, Michael founded ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, a biannual publication of contemporary art.

RSVP to info@atne.org. Space is limited.

The Game’s Afoot: Video Game Art Opening

Join us Friday, March 8 from 6-9pm for the opening reception of The Game’s Afoot: Video Game Art. Featuring work by Rob Gonsalves, Victor Liu and Anthony Montuori, The Game’s Afoot investigates the nature of video games both as games and as art. This exhibition coincides with the PAX East Convention at the Boston Convention Center, at which Boston Cyberarts is also programming the 80 foot LED Marquee with art by Massachusetts Video Game designers and teachers.

Feb. 27th ATNE Salon: Generative Art Using Computational Physics

Generative art is created with the use of an autonomous system, usually a computational process fashioned by the artist.  Many methods used by generative artists such as Golan Levin, Casey Reas, and Scott Draves are, at their origins, simulations of complex systems which exhibit emergent behavior. The natural world is full of such systems. Computational physics is the study of converting the often impenetrable mathematics of real physics into a virtual, computer-friendly form. In other words, it lets us turn differential equations into ordered streams of simple operations: addition, multiplication, and the occasional square root.

City of Work opening

On Friday, January 11, we celebrate the opening of Michael Lewy’s City of Work. Using photography, video, computer graphics and the Internet, Lewy has constructed an entire society where vacations are given by lottery, jobs are determined by the Human Potential Institute and it is illegal to be unemployed. This exhibition will include a computer based introductory orientation about your new work environment, an opportunity to take a Human Potential Institute test and find out exactly what job you will be assigned to and further inspirational quotes of Marcus Sterling L’amour.

Friday January 11, 6pm to 9pm

COLLISION18:Present opening

Boston Cyberarts Gallery first ever opening reception!

On November 9, 2012 we celebrated the first opening at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery. For our first exhibition we welcomed the COLLISIONcollective and their eighteenth group show, COLLISION18:Present.

This exhibition explored the concept of an eternal present as obtained by the use of looping media, static images, sculpture and installation. Other meanings of the word “present” are suggested: gifts to and from the artist and viewer, presentation and simple presence in a place and time.

Curated by COLLISIONcollective members William Tremblay, John Slepian and Bob Kephart, COLLISION18:Present consists of 30 works by artists from the Boston area, and from across the US, France, Spain, Switzerland and Israel.

Artists in the show include Natalie Andrew, Raphael Arar, Liat Berdugo, Nathan Boyer, W. Benjamin Bray, Sarah Buckius, Will Copps, Charles J. Crowell, DataSpaceTime, Juan Escudero, Joseph Farbrook, Chris Fitch, Rob Gonsalves, Dave Gordon, Faith Holland, Mary Anna LaFratta, Georgina Lewis, dan paluska, Lalie Schewadron Pascual, Alexander Reben, Jean-Michel Rolland, Anne Morgan Spalter, Wayne Strattman, Jim Susinno, Brad Tober, Jeffu Warmouth and Keren Zatlz.

COLLISION18:Present will be on display at the gallery from November 9 – December 16, 2012.

Gallery hours are Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11am – 6pm. The gallery is on the ground floor level of the Green Street train stop on the Orange line. 141 Green St. Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

ATNE Salon: The Inseparability Of Art And Technology

Join Art Technology New England for the second in our series of informal discussions on art/technology topics. At each event, we’ll start the discussion with a presentation by an expert in the field who’ll provide context and raise provocative questions. Next, with the help of a moderator, we’ll turn the debate over to you. Share your ideas, discover new ones and participate in analytical discourse and artistic cross-pollination.

Engineer and artist Alexander Reben

This salon led by Alexander Reben will explore the unbreakable ties between art, technology and humanity. It will also cover some works of art which highlight people’s relationship with technology. The salon will begin with a short presentation followed by discussion questions. The remainder of the salon will be discussions in the group which will naturally lead though many topics.

Free event. Please bring your own refreshments.

Space is limited. Please RSVP to Alexander Reben at http://bit.ly/NS0sNJ

When: Wednesday, October 24th, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery
141 Green St.
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

Alexander is an engineer by day and an artist by night. He has a background in robotics, interaction and tangible design. When not working on robots and novel interfaces, Alex creates and builds kinetic, robotic and interactive art. He is a graduate from the MIT Media Lab and has taught courses at MIT and workshops internationally. Work Alex has done has been shown at Ars Electronica, MIT, Axiom, EYEBEAM, The Whitney Biennial, the RISD Sol Koffer gallery and others. Alex’s investigations into art and science have been published in major proceedings and books. His work has been featured in news outlets such as New Scientist, Fast Company, BBC, CBC, Hack a Day and others. He has spoken at well known venues including TED, ignite, foo camp and several universities.