Grounded
Exhibition: Saturday May 14th to Sunday June 26th
Opening Reception: Friday May 13th
Boston Cyberarts Gallery is pleased to present Grounded, an exhibition that explores the use of technology in contemporary art. In electrical terminology ‘grounded’ is the state of being connected to the earth. As an adjective, ‘grounded’ can also mean sensible, realistic, and unpretentious. New media is sometimes considered the most outré of art forms, but the dynamic nature of technology provides artists with a unique platform to substantively consider current events and the nature of the modern world. In Garden Rooms, Sophia Sobers attempts to reconnect people with the natural world by creating 3D scans of plants and rendering them into digital narratives. By training the world to jump synchronously, Total Jump attempts to accomplish world peace. Mark Stock implements computational physics to simulate the core of a supernova that is then represented as a sculptural object in Chaotic Escape (m70).
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Betsy Connors is an artist associated with research and experimentation in holography, photography, video, and computer controlled lighting effects. An MIT alumna and former lecturer in the Media Labs’ Spatial Imaging Group, Connors also founded ACME Holography, one of the only private holography labs in the Boston area. She has created site-specific installations for public and private institutions, has won major awards, commissions and fellowships, and exhibited her work internationally.
Amber Davis Tourlentes considers how political and class boundaries are formed and fluctuate. She is interested in the personal and public facets of identity and inclusion. Tourlentes received her MFA and BFA in Photography + Digital Media at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Davis-Tourlentes has taught photography and visual arts at Princeton University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Emerson College, and Harvard University. She is currently teaching in the Studio Foundation Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design Some of Davis-Tourlentes solo and invited group exhibitions include Axiom Green Street Station Gallery, Lesley University, Smith College, WORKS, San Jose, Harvery Milk Institute, SF, Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, Circa Gallery in Montreal, Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, ArtStrand, Provincetown, Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Bakalar and Paine Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Boston Public Library. Website: amber.tourlentes.com
Joseph Farbrook grew up in New York City and Santa Fe, raised by his father, a concrete poet and his mother, a painter. His work has been in electronic installations, interactive video, and virtual reality narratives. He has also developed media-reflexive live performances mixed with interactive screen projections. His latest work explores the intersections between video, video games, and sculpture.
Farbrook exhibits his work regularly in galleries and museums worldwide, including SIGGRAPH, The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, The AC Institute in NYC, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, MFA and Cyberarts Gallery Boston, and Waterman’s Gallery London. Joseph Farbrook is an Associate Professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Caitlin Foley and Misha Rabinovich work collaboratively as artists and curators to create works which engage ideas and practices involving sharing communities, livable ecologies, and the transmutation of waste. Among other things they create interactive games, installations, and happenings where audience participation is a key component of the work and its message. Projects such as their DS Institute Sweat Battery actively creates/engages a sharing community through the collection of sweat from participants using their hand-made mobile sauna and transforms sweat “waste” into power to charge cell phones and symbolize collective energy. Naturally occurring systems such as rhizomatic networks of mycelium, the microbiome ecology, and emergent pink noise are inspirations for the shared experiences they construct as artists. Their work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, and Europe at such venues as EFA Project Space (NYC), Flux Factory (NYC), the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival (NYC), Marymount California University (LA), the Torrance Art Museum (LA), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), SIGGRAPH (LA), High Desert Test Sites HQ (Joshua Tree), Prague Biennale (Czech Republic), KCHUNG Radio (LA) and the Arts Center of the Capital Region (Troy, NY). Misha is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Caitlin is Adjunct Faculty in the Art & Design Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. They reside in Lowell, MA.
Websites: http://caitlinfoley.net/ http://misharabinovich.com/
Download Jump Up at https://soundcloud.com/gold-bikini
Raquel Fornasaro was born in São Paulo, Brazil where she studied and worked in advertising. In 2005 she moved to the US and attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. Now she lives and works in Newton, Massachusetts.
Originally working with oil portraits, Fornasaro recently integrated her previous experience as a digital designer to her artwork. Although painting remains paramount to her art, working with Photoshop accelerates the exploration of new ideas and perceptions giving way to an elusive and whimsical world.
Simón García-Miñaúr (b. 1991, Bilbao, Spain) completed his cinema studies at the Catalan Film School in Barcelona, ESCAC. He graduated in 2013 with a major in Direction of Photography, directing the short film Campanadas for his final academic assignment. He is currently enrolled in the Studio Art MFA program at San Francisco Art Institute, SFAI, in San Francisco, CA.
Ryan Kuo is an artist and writer drawn to reflexive systems and acts of non-knowledge. Many of his works occur in video, hypertext and game environments, and invoke a person or people arguing. Common to them are dialectical processes, attempts to triangulate new openings, wherein both artist and audience retain questionable agency.
In 2014 Ryan completed a thesis at MIT’s graduate program in Art, Culture and Technology which described vibrational and affective metaphors for encountering the computer. He has also been a medical student and a videogame critic. Ryan currently has a studio practice based out of Industry Lab in Cambridge, MA. Recent interests include spirals and sequencers, dogs, arpeggiators, office parties, and the creep along the white margin.
Dennis H. Miller is on the faculty of Northeastern University in Boston. His work illustrates principles drawn from music composition applied to the visual domain.
Nick Montfort develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively. He is on the faculty at MIT, where he directs the Trope Tank, and has a naming firm, Nomnym. Books of poems include the co-authored 2002: A Palindrome Story, #!, and the collaboration 2×6, coming soon. His more than fifty digital projects include the collaborations The Deletionist and Sea and Spar Between. The MIT Press published five of his collaborative and individual books, most recently, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. In 2014 his and Páll Thayer’s Programs at an Exhibition was presented at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery.
Brooke Scibelli is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Jamaica Plain, MA. Her work explores communication and repetition, resulting in various forms including 2D, 3D, and time based works. She holds a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Matthew Shanley is a multimedia artist whose range of practice includes sound, installation, public art, generative computer projects, video, internet art, and print. He holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, and a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He currently resides in Boston, MA.
Sophia Sobers is an interdisciplinary artist who creates sculptures, installations and environments in an ongoing process of crossing boundaries between science, nature and the spiritual. She earned her MFA in Digital + Media from RISD in 2013 and a BS in Architecture from NJIT in 2011. She received numerous grants and commissions, including the Puffin Foundation Grant, the 195 Redevelopment Commission, and the Here Now Commission from Purpose. Sobers has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Find & Form Space and the AS220 Reading Room. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in Brooklyn, NYC, Boston, Washington, DC, Newark, NJ, and Los Angeles, as well as online as part of The Wrong – New Media Biennial (2013). Her work has been written about in Blouin ARTINFO, The Creators Project, RISD XYZ, the Providence Phoenix. She is currently a Mellon Photography Fellow at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.
Mark Stock is an artist, scientist, and programmer who creates still and moving images and objects combining elements of nature, physics, chaos, computation, and algorithm. His work explores the tension between the natural world and its simulated counterpart, between organic and inorganic, digital and analog, and structure and fluid. Mark eschews the ‘black box’ nature of commercial software—his work is exclusively created with scientifically-accurate research software, mostly of his own design. He has been showing work since 2000 and has been in over 80 curated and juried exhibitions since 2001, including Ars Electronica, ASPECT Magazine, and seven SIGGRAPH Art Galleries. He has spoken at numerous scientific, graphics, and art conferences and workshops, and has published papers in a variety of fields. Mark completed his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2006 and works out of his studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is represented in California by SENSE Fine Art.