festival /exhibitions
The festival will include two exhibitions:
- PHYSICAL | DIGITAL at The Museum of Art & History @ The McPherson Center
- BLINK: DANM Student Work at the Porter Sesnon Gallery
PHYSICAL | DIGITAL
The Museum of Art & History @ The McPherson Center, Santa Cruz (
MAH site).
May 4–14, 2006
Opening reception: May 4, 6-9 pm
UCSC Digital Arts and New Media Festival, 2006 is pleased to announce the exhibition Physical | Digital, one of the highlights of the DANM Festival that will take place at UCSC between May 4th and May 7th, 2006.
The works included in Physical | Digital reveal a remarkable match between subject and medium. Jim Campbell, Paul DeMarinis and Camille Utterback share an intense involvement with technology that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging. Through their creative activities these artists question the influence that media technology has in contemporary life, revealing with their inquiries a view that is both mistrustful of the myths that accompany modern technology and engaged with the creative possibilities that it offers. They produce work that discloses a strikingly poetic (im)material world, one in which video cameras, computers, programming code, and loudspeakers are tools of enlightenment and artistic expression at its best.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Jim Campbell
Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the mid 1980s. His custom electronic sculptures and installations have made him a leading figure in the use of computer technology as an art form. Campbell's electronic artwork is included in collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the NY MOMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in Multimedia, a Daniel Langlois Foundation grant, a Eureka Fellowship Award and was among the first recipients of the SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) award in electronic media in 1996.
For further information, see http://www.jimcampbell.tv/
Paul DeMarinis
Camille Utterback
Camille Utterback, originally trained in traditional media, has been creating ground-breaking interactive installations since 1999. Her work has been exhibited extensively at venues including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; The NTT ICC, Tokyo; The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art; The Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev, Ukraine; and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Awards include a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002), and a Whitney Museum commission for the CODeDOC project on their ArtPort website (2002). She received her B.A. in Art from Williams College (1992), and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (1999). She lives and works in San Francisco.
For further information see http://www.camilleutterback.com/.
ABOUT THE WORKS:
Jim Campbell
The two pieces of Jim Campbell presented at the MAH are part of his series called
“Ambiguous Icons“ explore the relationship between information and meaning, in the context of reduced or compressed levels of information. These works incorporate custom electronics driving LEDs with 256 gray levels.
1. Wave Modulation, 2003
Custom electronics, 768 white LEDs, treated Plexiglas
This work incorporates low resolution and time variation to look at the notion of visual abstraction. The image gradually changes its speed over a 20 minute period, going from real time to still. This time processing takes place live, such that the still images that are seen at the end of the cycle are always different.”
2. Library, 2004
Custom electronics, 768 white LEDs, Photogravure, treated Plexiglas
Library is composed of a high-resolution photogravure of the New York Public Library, printed on rice paper and mounted in a Plexiglas frame that is suspended in front of an LED surface. The LED component contains and displays a 25-minute video chip loop of low-resolution moving images. Indistinct images of birds and people appear to move in and out of the library and across the facade. Library is first in a new series of works in which the artist is exploring photogravure prints combined with low-resolution moving images.
3. Drive, 2005
Custom Electronics, 192 RGB LEDs treated plexiglas
4. Reconstruction #5, 2005
Custom Electronics, 192 red LEDs. poured resin diffusion screen
Paul DeMarinis
(a)sync, 2006
Sound Installation
Projector, audio spotlights
Camille Utterback
Untitled 6, 2005
Interactive installation
custom software, computer, video camera, projector
Untitled 6 is the sixth interactive installation in the External Measures Series, which Utterback has been developing since 2001. The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic system which responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. Alexander Calder’s mobiles are an inspiration for this series, as well as an excellent analog precedent for work that responds dynamically to its environment, yet maintains the artist’s aesthetic sensibility.
The External Measures Series installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software outputs a changing wall projection in response to the visitors’ activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of various parts of the projected image depend entirely on people’s presence and movement in the exhibit area. By investigating the aesthetic possibilities of projected “kinetic sculptures” or “living paintings,” the External Measures Series contributes to an evolving field of dynamic participatory art.
To create these works, Utterback first develops sets of animated marks whose parameters and behaviors are controlled by people’s movements. Then, out of a working ‘palette’ of these animated marks, she composes an overall composition. The behavior’s interaction with each other, and to the layering of movement in the space over time, is integral to the piece. The composition balances responses whose logic is immediately clear, with responses that feel connected to participant’s movements, but whose logic remains complex and mysterious. While the specific rules of the system are never explicitly revealed to participants, the internal structure and composition of the piece can be discovered through a process of kinesthetic exploration.
Engaging with this work creates a visceral sense of unfolding or revelation, but also a feeling of immediacy and loss. The experience of this work is the experience of embodied existence itself - a continual flow of unique and fleeting moments. The effect is at once sensual and contemplative.
BLINK: DANM Student Work
Porter Sesnon Gallery, UCSC (Sesnon Site)
May 5 - 6, 2006
Opening reception: May 5, 5.30 - 7.30 pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12 - 5 pm
Participants:
Tyler Freemann
Bob Giges and Michael Dale
James Khazar
GamelanPlesetan {featuring Sapto Raharjo, Professor Rene Lysloff, DJ saKAna (aka no.e Parker), and Spukkin Faceship}
Michella Rivera-Gravage
Abram Stern (aka aphid)
Alan Tollefson
Cynthia Payne