COLLISION19:COmpress/DECompress

Exhibition: Friday June 14th - Sunday July 28th

Boston Cyberarts Gallery presents COLLISION19:COmpress/DECompress, organized by the COLLISIONcollective  and guest juried by Boston Cyberarts assistant director, Stephanie Dvareckas. COLLISION:19 includes twenty two artists from eight countries around the world whose  work lingers at the junction of art, technology and science. Chosen  from an international open call, COLLISION:19 exemplifies the diverse range of work produced by artists working under the influence of technology.

Some pieces, such as Elizabeth Fuller’s Schrödinger, address our acceptance of scientific theories. Schrödinger is an exercise in frustration: the closer you approach the piece, the  more difficult it is to see the subject. A box of one-way mirrors  encompasses a lit cat. Yet, as the observer approaches the cat, the  lights lower. With lessening light, the material of the box becomes more  mirrored and obscures the cat until, upon close inspection there is  nothing to see.

Others  are social experiments where technology is implemented to uncover  something about human behavior. This can be seen in Lauren McCarthy’s Social Turkers: Crowdsourced Relationships where Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (a website where one can hire a person  to perform jobs that computers aren’t able to accomplish) gets paid to  watch and give feedback on romantic dates.

Nathaniel Hartman’s extraterrestrial origins of pulsating stars examines the timings of 96 rotating pulsars as light and sound. An  array of LED tubes displays either single stars as a pulsing wave or  clusters of stars, creating a cacophony of visual and sonic noise. The  brightness of the array also changes with the stars’ relative distance  from Earth, giving the viewer a sense of spatial awareness.

Artists include

Marios Athanasiou, Axes,  Nathan Boyer,  Zachary Clemente, Will Copps, Juan Escudero, Antony Flackett, Elizabeth Fuller,  Rob Gonsalves, Nathaniel Hartman,  Stephanie Hough,  Bob Kephart, Paul Kinsy, Lauren McCarthy, Matteo Pasin, Hector Rodriguez, Jean-Michel Rolland, John Slepian, Mark J Stock, Wayne Strattman, William Tremblay and Emilio Vavarella.

ABOUT COLLISIONcollective

Formed  by artists and technologists, the COLLISIONcollective is premised on  the intersection between art and technology. Its practitioners are drawn  to this synthesis as the epicenter of forward-looking cultural  adaptation. COLLISIONcollective was formed to address several vital  needs: the promotion of artists, the creation of events and venues for  exhibition, and fostering the exchange of ideas, techniques, and  enthusiasm for making art. COLLISIONcollective brings together people of  all ages and disciplines in a collective format, creating a supportive  community. It has eighty-five members from around the U.S., who are  active visual artists/engineers and holds forums and invites speakers of  interest to their members. It is the largest organization of its type  in New England.

For more information, visit http://www.collisioncollective.org/show/collision19