History of the Future

Exhibition: Saturday May 26th Through Sunday July 1st

Opening Reception: Friday May 25th

This exhibition is the result of an open call for work that pairs art and technology in a thought provoking and visually engaging manner. History of the Future features fifteen artists hailing from as far away as Singapore and Switzerland, as well as local Bostonians and places in-between. Many of the works incorporate historical and cultural references into the medium and message of their technologically savvy contemporary artworks.

Exhibition attendees will encounter the familiar sound of Pachelbel’s Canon in D in Bob Kephart‘s Dueling Canons. This sculpture consisting of motor driven music box mechanisms and utilizes musical rounds to juxtapose the conventional idea of a canon with interrupting musical voices, which result in a chaotic sound. Viewers will glimpse historic paintings in Keaton Fox‘s The Green Screen Paintings which use modern technology to examine how far humans have progressed – as artists and as a species. Inspired by Bruegel the Elder’s medieval painting of the blind leading the blind, Daniel Alexander Smith‘s Beacon projects the light of an unseeing eye, digitally reconstructed as a ghosted hologram on a paper-thin scaffold. The sculpture explores blindness as an allegory for the relationship between technology and culture. Nick Montfort‘s Autofolio Babel, is a computational book art work incorporating a computer program that is based on Jorge Luis Borges’s description of the pages in the immense but not infinite Library of Babel.

Sara Bonaventura taps into seemingly recent, but already outdated technologies using analog synths and a wobbulator to process her video Stakra, a mystical and hallucinatory journey of a resilient subject, not yet completely seduced by the machines. In Pat Lay‘s Collages, 54AAA0254 and B53K477-2, the traditional scroll format is used to give the works the presence of a thangka, an object for contemplation. Digital images scanned from computer circuit boards are printed on Japanese kozo paper and then collaged into patterns that transform them into a new matrix. Jenny E. Balisle‘s OPTIC 2 video visualizes how information traverses through fiber-optic cables on the ocean’s floors. Lalie S. Pascual‘s Seasons Of Time is a mix of video with digital media. Using shape algorithms and random scripts, the fragmented imagery, is recomposed, into an ambivalent video-moving-image mix which is in a constant state of regeneration. The final artwork suggests a world where the macro meets the micro, and the past meets the present and the futuristic.

Many of the works explore the current social political landscape continuing a long history of artists engaging with contemporary culture. Jody Zellen‘s News Wheel is an iOS app that explores the poetics of ever changing news headlines. This playful interface invites users to start and stop the wheel eventually filling the screen with a collage of current headlines. Tyler Bohm‘s Generative Model UN is a set of flags designed by a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (GAN), which has been trained on a custom data set of thousands of flag images. The physical flags are arranged in the shape of a computer power symbol. Hye Yeon Nam‘s Invisible uses a computational system to evoke understanding and a discussion of current racial stereotype issues. The sculpture prints sentences that include derogatory racial terms, and then a robotic arm cuts and throws the papers away on the ground. Amongst the piles of hurtful messages, one can find examples that seek to educate the readers to the injured feelings and sensitivities of the races. Molly O’Donnell‘s video series Mediate Me reflects our interactions with our smartphones that have begun to question the politics of image, objectification, and our representation on the Internet.

Some of the artworks incorporate nuanced user interaction. Yao Wang‘s Unraveled is an immersive 360˚ virtual reality experience where the listener finds themselves at the center of all elements, being surrounded by choir, strings, synths and imagery. The interactive nature of spatial audio makes the experience authentically personalized. Jeffu Warmouth‘s Lilliput, is an interactive video installation much like a video mirror, but in which small people fall out of the sky and land on the viewer’s arms head and shoulders. They can be held and played with or helped to continue on their way down. Bang T. Luu‘s sculptures, Input | Output were created using mathematical algorithms extracted from audio recordings of sleep participants and their environments, to generate three-dimensional objects.

The works in History of the Future beckon viewers to reflect on the integral role of art in playing with and navigating the constantly evolving use of technology. Boston Cyberarts recent open call received such a plethora of strong submissions that we could not fit it all in one exhibition. As counterpart to the exhibition opening this month, a second exhibition titled Future of History will take place in the gallery in the Fall of 2018.

About the Artists

Jenny E. Balisle currently works as an artist, curator, advocate, writer, lecturer, and instructor at the Academy of Art University and UC Berkeley Extension. Her work has appeared in exhibits at the de Young Museum Artist-in-Residence, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Chicago Cultural Center, Korean Cultural Center, Harvard University, Farmington Museum, Museu Brasileiro Sao Paulo, and Shanghai Oil Painting & Sculpture Institute Art Museum.

Tyler Bohm is a new media artist who spent several years working in the architectural industry, where he adopted the tools and techniques of digital and physical modeling to create digitally-inspired sculptural, video and hybrid works. He has held solo exhibitions at the OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus and the NEIU Fine Arts Center Gallery in Chicago, and participated in group shows at Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn), NURTUREart (Brooklyn), Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore), Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia), Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati), Gallery Madison Park (New York), Proto Gallery (Hoboken, NJ) and the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY). He is a Greater Columbus Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship finalist. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and lives in Columbus.

Sara Bonaventura is an Italian visual artist currently based in Singapore. As independent videomaker she has been collaborating with performers and musicians, such as Carla Bozulich and the Canadian Constellation Records. Her works have been screened in Italy and abroad; recently, at the Anthology Film Archives, NewFilmmakers NY series, and for Other Cinema at San Francisco ATA Gallery. She won the Veneto Region Award at the 10th Lago Film Fest in 2014. She is currently working on her first feature film, Forest Hymn for Little Girls.

Keaton Fox is a multidisciplinary artist who uses art and technology to reflect the digital disarray of the modern world. Fueled by child-like fascination and frustrations, Fox combines the natural with the virtual to create visual experiments that playfully explore the varied realities of our time. She has exhibited nationally, internationally, physically and digitally.

Bob Kephart began creating artwork that incorporates technology during his undergraduate studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, AB Canada. His sculptures during this period were loud and satirical – much like the sculptures of Jean Tinguely. He went on to earn an MFA in the Art and Technology Department from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While in Chicago, his sculpture matured and grew in complexity while adhering to the formal and conceptual qualities of his earlier works. Bob moved to Massachusetts in 2003 where he has a studio and maintains a website that features his artwork: automeditate.com

Pat Lay‘s work spans mixed media sculpture, collage and works on paper. She has been a professional artist since 1968; lived in SOHO, NYC for twelve years and has been living and working in Jersey City, NJ since 1981. A graduate of Pratt Institute and Rochester Institute of Technology, Lay is a retired Professor of Art, Montclair State University. She has had solo exhibitions at Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, the Jersey City Museum; New Jersey State Museum; and Douglass College, Rutgers University. Work has been included in group exhibitions in Japan, Austria, Korea, China, Norway, Wales and Slovakia and at the Jersey City Museum, Newark Museum, New Jersey State Museum, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Everson Museum, and the 1975 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She born and raised in Milford, Connecticut.

Bang Luu is a Boston based artist whose work explores the way current social and technological systems apprehend the world. She is investigating the role visual aesthetics play in the translation and understanding of new and existing algorithms for the discovery of patterns, correlations, and outliers. She holds an Bachelor of Fine Arts from College of the Holy Cross. Luu has exhibited her work at galleries and institutions throughout the northeast and nationally including Widener Gallery, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Iris & B Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. She was also commission to showcase for the Boston Conventional & Exhibition Center for their 3,000 square feet digital display. She worked with 14×48 nonprofit organization in creating art work for a billboard in Manhattan to promote awareness for Breast Cancer. Her latest work, Malignant, is selected for Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach.

Nick Montfort‘s computer-generated books of poetry include #!, the collaboration 2×6, Autopia, and The Truelist, the first in Counterpath’s new Using Electricity series, which he is editing. Among his more than fifty digital projects are the collaborations The Deletionist, Sea and Spar Between, and Renderings. His digital art has been shown recently in Babycastles in New York and in Boston City Hall. He has six books out from the MIT Press, most recently The Future (in the Essential Knowledge series). He is professor of digital media at MIT and lives in New York and Boston.

Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist working on interactive installations and performance video. She holds a Ph.D. in digital media from Georgia Institute of Technology, an M.F.A. in digital media from Rhode Island School of Design, and a B.F.A. in Information Design from Ewha Womans University. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange, and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. Hye Yeon’s art has been showcased in The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C, Times Square, the art gallery Eyebeam and The Tank, the Conflux, the D.U.M.B.O. Art Festival in New York, FILE, SIGGRAPH, CHI, ISEA, E3 Expo, the Lab in San Francisco, and several festivals in China, Istanbul, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. She is currently an assistant professor in digital art at Louisiana State University.

Molly O’Donnell is a visual artist working in the Boston/Cambridge area. She is a BFA candidate at Lesley University College of Art and Design (formally Art Institute of Boston). In May 2018 she will receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography with a minor in Installation/Performance Art and Art History. Molly has been exhibited and published locally including galleries in Lesley University, Griffin Museum of Photography, Mass Art Designand Media Center, SoWa Boston: Laconia Gallery, and several others. Molly is currently a Communication Press Intern for Harvard Art Museum and is working as a digital imaging assistant/circulation assistant at the Moriarty Art Library in Cambridge MA.

New media artist, Lalie S. Pascual received her MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martins University of the Arts in London, having being previously trained at Brandeis University, Massachusetts. Her art practice is intended to explore ideas of growth and expansion in our scientific and natural worlds. Using video and digital imagery she creates fragile equilibriums that could be reconstructed or separated at any moment in time. She received a Brandeis teaching fellowship award (Waltham, MA), was a finalist of the Celeste Art Prize (London) and won the Drawing Conclusion competition by ArtSEEN journal (Florence). She exhibited internationally including London, Glasgow, Basel, Lausanne, New York, Boston, Singapour, Hong Kong, and Seoul. She currently lives and works in Lausanne Switzerland.

Daniel Alexander Smith is a visual artist based in Boston, MA. He is currently a Design Fellow at Studio Echelman, where he works on design and project management for sculpture at city-scale. In 2016, he completed an MFA Fellowship at Indiana University. In 2015 he founded Paper-Thin, an online virtual reality art archive, which he has directed and curated with collaborator, Cameron Buckley. Daniel’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The University of Richmond Museums, the CICA Museum in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, SIGGRAPH, the Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica in SãoPaulo, Brazil, the Athens Digital Arts Festival in Athens, Greece, as well as universities and galleries across the country.

Yao Wang is a composer, sound designer and artist who developed a passion for music at a very young age. She recently graduated from Berklee College of Music with a Bachelor of Music Degree in Electronic Production & Design and Film Scoring. Yao has made it her mission to pursue a career combining her love for music, sound and technology. Her company ICTUS provides spatial audio solutions to immersive experiences including VR, AR and MR by blending musical composition and sound design together to create a soundscape that completes the visual reality.

Jeffu Warmouth is a Massachusetts-based conceptual artist whose work asks the viewer to unravel their relationships to language, identity, and culture. His installation & media artwork has exhibited and screened internationally, including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery; Fitchburg Art Museum; the deCordova Museum; Boston Center for the Arts; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, MD; Experimenta Media Arts, Australia; and the 404 Festival of Art & Technology, Argentina & Colombia.

Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously. She creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artists’ books. She received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). Her site specific interactive installations include “News Wheel” (2017); “Time Jitters” (2014); “The Unemployed” (2011); and “The Blackest Spot” (2008). She has created 7 free iOS apps downloadable from iTunes: “Time Jitters,” “Urban Rhythms,” “Spine Sonnet,” “Art Swipe,” “4 Square,” “Episodic,” and “News Wheel.”