Poetic Codings

An exhibition of projections and iPad apps organized by Jody Zellen

Exhibition: Saturday April 27th - Sunday June 2nd 

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.

The Poetic Coding Online Catalog is available here.

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.

PRESS

What’s up at Boston-area art galleries by Cate McQuaid, May 14, 2013, Boston Globe [Poetic Codings]