#NewAestheticVideo (2012) by Mark Amerika
This mock trailer for a movie that was never made but lives on the Web as a distributed narrative, refers to an eponymous artist whose artistic presence and remixed persona is a mashup of mobile phone videos, animated gifs, Google Earth glitch imagery, and the corrupting presence of a literary voice summoned from the digital-beyond.

Gen 244 (2011) by Scott Draves
Artificial intelligence and human designers come together in this generative, participatory “cloud art” work made with mathematics and Darwinian evolution by Draves’ Electric Sheep open source code. The essence of life is created in digital form in the artwork’s cyborganic mind comprised of 450,000 computers and people who vote on their favorite designs which reproduce according to a genetic algorithm.

04302011 (2011) by Sophie Kahn
Laser portraits that appear incomplete and fragmented as a result of disruptions caused by the models’ movement and breathing during the scanning process, suggest a metaphor of instability in our digitally mediated identities.

Streaming Museum’s fall 2010 exhibition featured at Zero One San Jose Biennial, Tina b. Prague Contemporary Art Festival, the Big Screen Project NYC, and throughout its global network of screens in public spaces.

We Write This To You From the Distant Future is a multi-media exhibition of work by visionary creators in the arts and sciences that focuses on a future world imagined and possible to build.

The exhibition title is a line spoken by the narrator in Immobilité (2009), a 75-minute feature length art film shot with a mobile phone video camera by Mark Amerika, with music score by Chad Mossholder. A remix collection from Immobilité opens the exhibition evoking questions – how will a technologically advanced world effect what it is to be human and what is the world with advanced technology to become?

In Michael Najjar’s bionic angel (2006) series (courtesy, bitforms gallery, NYC), creatures in the throes of transformation are a metaphor for inevitable genetic self-creation and possible immortality of the human body.

EMANUEL DIMAS DE MELO PIMENTA, Kairos: an architectural design for a building in Earth’s orbit, 2011

This video and sound artwork was created in memory of John Cage, René Berger, Joseph Beuys, Hans Joachim Koellreutter, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and John Archibald Wheeler – seven magical doors to a new universe. The sound art is composed of extraterrestrial sounds and was presented in concert SETI in 2002.

“Human must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives” – Socrates (469-399 BC)

“Following Nature’s own design principles, human may be able to produce most-economic designs while at the same time solving formerly insoluble design problems” – Richard Buckminster Fuller

Kairos is an orbital building, a privileged observatory of Earth, open to civil society, recalling the ancient Sumerian concept of ‘deep time’, projecting a complex of human values in a large-scale spectrum. KAIROS is a conceptual work that merges architecture design and art project in a same corpus – a crossing point between aesthetics, function and technology. Being an architectural design, it presents structural developments in terms of function and technological challenges. As a visual artwork, it crosses all fields of environments and functions, projecting unexpected images that are, at the same time, abstract and figurative, linear and non-linear. As an artwork it questions and criticizes the concept of contemporary art and culture in general. In few words, Kairos is a design for an orbital building.

Kairos was launched on September 10, 2011, at Holotopia Academy, Amalfi Coast, where Ulysses met the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. The work became a part of the permanent collection at the ancient 17th century tower which was transformed into a contemporary art museum by the scientist and art lover, Alberto del Genio, Founder of the Holotopia Academy which is devoted to music, art and philosophy. On the 27th of October 2011 Kairos was exhibited at the Robotarium technology/art center in Lisbon, Portugal, curated by its founder/director and robotic artist, Leonel Moura. and in November of the same year the book Kairos: A Bird Orbiting Planet Earth was released. It includes details of the project, and a history of space satellites, laboratories and stations.

May 28 – June 30 at Big Screen Plaza and StreamingMuseum.org
Curated by Tanya Toft, Curatorial Fellow, Streaming Museum

Streaming Museum opened the exhibition CYBORG ALARM: When Technology, Imagination and Body Collide on May 28, 2012, from 6 to 10 pm at Big Screen Plaza, NYC, featuring artwork by 2011 NYFA Fellows and Finalists.

The artworks featured in CYBORG ALARM exemplify how art can translate these issues across time, space and cultures. Telling a story through images of the human dimension in the digital world, they could be considered “contemporary hieroglyphs.” They include:
 

Karolina Sobecka’s Capacity to Act in a World (2011) investigates the limits and meaning of human agency. It explores behavior within an interdependent matrix of elements, sets of norms and constructed histories. The piece exposes our capabilities for navigating and understanding the world in our overtly mediated environments.
 

In Dreams (2009) by Michael Greathouse is inspired by film noir and b/w Hollywood horror films and produced exclusively with composited computer animation. It depicts continual repetition of a single moment of a human portrait floating in animated waters. In Dreams addresses identity in terms of continuity and journeys through an anachronistic world with endless dimensions.
 

04302011 (2011) by Sophie Kahn is a collection of laser portraits of New Yorkers inspired by rotating 3-D models of people on large public screens in sci-fi movie scenes. The portraits appear incomplete and fragmented as a result of disruptions caused by the models’ movement and breathing during the scanning process, suggesting a metaphor of instability in our digitally mediated identities.

REVELATION: Jeremy Blake, Jenny Marketou, Yorgo Alexopoulos, Marty St. James
60:00
 

 
ARTISTS:

In the fall of 2011 the exhibition Revelation, in commemoration of 9/11, presented a collection of existential portraits and reflections on streams of realities that exist simultaneously in the contemporary world. Featured artists include Jeremy Blake, Jenny Marketou, Yorgo Alexopoulos, and Marty St. James. The artwork was balanced with a showcase of visionary programs that confront the world’s most pressing problems with solutions to bring about the Regeneration of society and the environment – The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, Green World Campaign, and the Ubuntu Education Center, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Jeremy Blake and Yorgo Alexopoulos are presented courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art in New York.

Revelation Part 1 – featured the artwork of Jeremy Blake and Jenny Marketou which is juxtaposed as a dialog that brings to view beautiful images that are concealing inherent danger. Blake’s Chemical Sundown aims at LA’s fantasy of exceptionally colorful sunsets that are in reality ominously artificial and caused by pollution. In Marketou’s Levels of Disturbance, a revolving sphere intrudes over video footage of the natural landscape of Los Alamos filmed from an airplane, mesmerizes and subverts attention from the reality of its radioactive history.

Revelation Part 2 – Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Redux is part of his Winchester series that distills and abstracts American myths of violence and spiritual reconciliation. The dreamlike flow of images gives an abstract emotional tour of the fearful chambers of his subject’s mind. Marty St. James’ Oneiric enters inner dimensions and confines of the individual, and reconstructed reality is explored in The Invisible Man. Yorgo Alexopolous’ No Feeling is Final is an abstract narrative symbolizing the interconnection between mathematics, humans, nature and universe, the real and virtual. Blake’s “Station to Station: Indiglo Heights is the fifth in a series of five individual time-based paintings,representing an imaginary urban transportation system. ”Contemporary anxieties concerning chemical weaponry, global warming gasses and mysterious technologies were also kept well in mind while making this work,” Blake wrote, “as was the sensory excitement of travel and the hypnotic allure of bright, pulsating city lights.”

Video portraits from conflict zones and architecture hovering above earth –
The intimate video portraits of Marines in Afghanistan by Balazs Gardi bring real-life connection with the men serving in one of the most dangerous conflict zones in the world. The work was created as a project of Basetrack, a web-based reporting initiative supported with a grant from the Knight Foundation.

This contrasts with a world-view from outerspace in Kairos – an architectural design for a building to orbit the earth by Emanuel Pimenta, that is informed by Socrates (469-399BC): “Humans must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” Pimenta dedicated this video and sound artwork to his collaborators, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and to the humanist concepts of Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys and other visionaries.
 

 
Chemical Sundown, 2001, video still. Courtesy of
Kinz + Tillou Fine Art

JEREMY BLAKE, Chemical Sundown, 2001, Station to Station #5, 2001, Winchester Redux, 2004

Chemical Sundown, 2001

In the past few decades Los Angeles has outpaced New York City as the urban environment that best exemplifies the apocalyptic in American consciousness. One portentous prospect, global warming, is hinted at in the popular wisdom that LA sunsets are exceptionally colorful because the atmosphere surrounding the city is polluted. Despite the fact that today’s mass anxieties are often yesterday’s news, cliches surrounding a specific place sometimes hold interest for me because they indicate inter-subjective fantasy locations and/or events more compelling than their sources in reality.

Chemical Sundown is a time-based painting that combines architectural and abstract imagery, inspired by the legendary optical effects of LA’s tainted air. The piece begins with a graphic depiction of a horizon line that begins to radically change shape, indicating a landscape capable of liquefying without warning. Soon, images appear which portray a glamorous modernist structure, built on this land despite the inherent danger. This structure is equipped with sliding walls and large windows designed to let in natural light. The changing light, in combination with the smog, creates clouds of color that range from beautiful to ominously artificial. Technically, this work deliberately ignores certain restrictions on bright colors in the NTSC color system. Other “raw” elements are also consciously left visible. The intention is to enable something like the visual equivalent of the controlled distortion common in electronically produced music.

In one room of the structure a film loop is shown embedded in a set of monitors. The footage (from the film Casino Royale) shows a woman in a pink gown, standing on a pink spinning bed, enjoying a shower of feathers swirling around her. This image of unapologetic hedonism is used here as a sexy, phantom presence. I also like the subtle implication that the cycling footage might have a hidden, but specific effect on the function of the architecture around it. (I imagine this working in much the same way that-in the movies at least-a ray of light might activate the door of an ancient tomb.)

An oval shape is repeated throughout the piece. This shape is meant to recall the sun, the lenses of sunglasses, and is arranged in groups of two that resemble the number eight. The 8 shapes provide a visual link to an earlier and related series of works entitled “Bungalow 8″, which dealt with the glamour, decadence and ambiance of Hollywood’s mythic character.

Jeremy Blake, 2001

Courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York
 

 
Station to Station, 2001

Station to Station is a series of five individual time-based paintings (digital animations on DVD) that have been conceived to work as discrete pieces, but also forms a coherent series or system that, when shown together, adds substantially to the meaning and the impact of each individual work. Although each work is multifaceted, the basic structure of the series is simple. The first, third, and fifth monitor of this five-screen series represent stations on an imaginary urban transportation system. The second and forth represent travel between these stations.
The space intersected and contained by this system is meticulously gridded off, entirely design-mediated, and one which changes in color and mood constantly. Distinctions between inside and outside, and near and far prove to be difficult to draw, and largely deceptive when they are drawn. Contemporary anxieties concerning chemical weaponry, global warming gasses, and mysterious technologies were also kept well in mind while making this work, as was the sensory excitement of travel and the hypnotic allure of bright, pulsating city lights. For much of this imagery and atmosphere I have drawn from daily life in New York, as well as memories of the smoggy vistas of Los Angeles, but a major inspiration for the for the design of the three stations comes from an element of the subway system in Tokyo.

On a trip to Tokyo several years ago I was struck by the design of a bank of coin operated storage lockers in a downtown subway station. This bank was relatively large (from my snapshots I’d estimate at least 12 feet wide and 7 feet high). The door of each locker had one small section of a large landscape photograph printed on it. When all the doors were closed, a large landscape was visible, and the overall effect when viewed from a distance effectively simulated the experience of looking out a window at an attractive view. More often than not however, unused lockers were left open, creating gaping black holes in sections of the bigger picture. The fact that this apparently deep space quickly proved itself to be both traumatically shallow and defined primarily by its utility struck me as definitively contemporary. Therefore, each of the stations in Station to Station is outfitted with one of these banks of lockers, as well as abstract elements that have been derived from its design. In this work abstraction is treated not as static and monumental, but as something that may set in and wear off like the effects of a drug-or that may appear and disappear like a mirage.

Another, more general source for this work is “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s excellent biography of urban planner Robert Moses. Caro describes Moses as a brilliant, corrupt, and almost unbelievably arrogant figure-and the planner to whom we owe many of the defining characteristics of the infrastructure in and around New York City. In his book Caro has crafted gripping descriptions of Moses blasting through bedrock and destroying neighborhoods to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and clearing slums only to reinforce their existence with monumental housing projects. The fact that one person, and therefore one person’s subjectivity, is the source for so much of what I had always assumed was the result of a gradual accumulation of projects by different planners struck me as disturbing. In the course of reading “The Power Broker”, I began to imagine Moses as the Darth Vader of New York aesthetics, subliminally telling generations well meaning New York artists who have been influenced by their surroundings what they might have suspected but least wanted to hear, “I am your father Luke…” This fantasy is obviously an exaggeration encouraged by some startling reading, but its true that Moses’ grim aesthetics still help to define what its like to travel through New York. Moses was generally pro automobile and anti-mass transit, so there is a deliberate irony in my naming a station after him.

At its inception, rail travel transformed the way in which space was perceived and the speed with which temporal and spatial information was processed. Each passenger with a view out of the window was provided with a framed, flattened, constantly shifting landscape. In a way that we now take for granted, each passenger had suddenly become the director of a non-narrative cinematic experience. Station to Station draws on this precedent as a foundation for its formal structure in order to better reference its own, relatively new space-altering potential as a completely subjective landscape created in a time-based medium and accessible through multiple simultaneous views. In general my work draws from both traditional painting and time-based media in order to create something new.

Jeremy Blake, 2001

Courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York
 

 
Winchester Redux, 2004

The Winchester trilogy and Winchester Redux are inspired by my interest in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The Mansion is an architectural wonder that Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, constructed over the course of 38 years, beginning in the late 1800’s. After suffering the premature death of her child and then her husband, Winchester, informed by her deep belief in Spiritualism, concluded that the angry spirits of those struck down by her family’s guns had cursed her. An advisor agreed and suggested that she build an enormously large house–an endeavor that would both accommodate good spirits and ward off evil ones with the sounds of never ending construction. The result is an eccentric, sprawling 160-room mansion, well outfitted for the undead with staircases going nowhere, doorways leading out into open air several stories above ground, and miles of darkened hallways for the spirits to roam.

The Winchester films combine 8mm film footage, static 16mm shots of old photographs, hundreds of ink drawings, and intricate frame-by-frame digital retouching. They are meant to provide an abstract and emotional tour–not so much of the architecture, but of some of the more fearful chambers of Sarah Winchester’s mind. The abstract imagery represents supernatural activity, heightened by paranoiac glimpses of shadowy gunfighters, painterly gunshot wounds blossoming into Rorschach patterns, and a spectrum of images from Winchester rifle advertisements. The entire series is informed by the idea that the Victorian aesthetic (embodied by the Mansion’s architecture) and the psychedelic sensibility (referenced through hallucinatory manipulation of the film) are sympathetic opposites.

My interest in the Mansion is rooted in an understanding that the site is more than just a monument to one person’s eccentric preoccupation-it is the tangible outcome from a collision of social and historical narratives. The series ties together several mythic strands fundamental to an American national identity in an attempt to justify Winchester’s architectural free-for-all. The figure of the gunfighter facilitates spiritual regeneration through violence, and lawmen and outlaws are thus treated with reverent trepidation-as are the ghosts of their victims.

Beneath the dreamlike flow of images, the structure of the films is very deliberate. They first explore the exterior of the Winchester Mansion, and then reveal glimpses of the interior, with an emphasis on parts destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. Sarah Winchester chose not to repair certain damaged sections, preferring to build around them, as she imagined that the house’s resident spirits disapproved of these accommodations. The camera next zooms in on a cinema complex of three space-age movie theaters situated across the street: Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23, alluding to the fact that it is film, TV and the media that perpetuate the icon of the gunfighter. This is represented by richly layered montages of the Old West and pop-culture imagery, as well as art and film celebrities who appear as phantom stand-ins to embody the specters of the Cowboy and of Sarah Winchester herself.

The Winchester series distills and abstracts American myths of violence and spiritual reconciliation.

Jeremy Blake, 2004
Winchester Redux, courtesy of Creative Time and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art
 

 
Biography

JEREMY BLAKE (1971 – 2007)

Jeremy Blake was an artist of recognized accomplishment and promise. His artistic achievements and career were fast on the rise. He was considered influential and iconoclastic. Sadly, Blake committed suicide in July 2007 in New York City one week after his beloved companion of 12 years, Theresa Duncan, committed suicide–the reasons for which remain open only to conjecture.

Blake first garnered attention in the late 1990s with his large-scale, semi-abstract digital C-prints that rendered the appearance of being paintings and photographs, but were neither. He then began to animate sequences of such images to create continuously looping digital video works that emulated paintings and film, but were neither. His visually dense images often incorporated both abstract and representational expressions through the language of Modernism and voices of Film Noir. Blake’s aesthetically stylized works addressed a range of subjects from violence and terrorism to glamour and decadence, from metaphors of architectural spaces to profiles of cultural personifications.

Blake’s works have been exhibited internationally. They were included in three Whitney Biennials, are represented in twelve museum collections, and are a topic of dissertations and textbooks. He is widely acclaimed as a pioneer in merging the traditions of painting with a new digital world. He created hybrids of new media works, new genres, and a new kind of art experience. He made “paintings” that were digital prints and films that were “moving paintings”. He was an innovator who opened doors to how others will express themselves long into the future.

Blake continued to challenge our expectations, as well as his own. He dissolved the distinction between object and time-based art while combining abstraction and representation in fresh and exciting ways. He used the most eloquent of formal vocabularies to illustrate hidden stories, present cinematic portraits and portray social perspectives. He was a narrative abstractionist who embraced history, pop culture, biography and fiction, and he always made things to be beautiful. His works are seductive; his subjects are provocative; his meanings are profound.

Jeremy Blake opened our eyes and expanded our ideas as to what art can be and how we see and think about the world. His contributions will be forever remembered and his legacy everlasting.

Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York