NEW YORK, NY.- Media platforms and technologies evolve at a breakneck speed these days, but what artists can do with them evolves even faster at times. How to keep up with some of the the latest creative ideas being realized in gaming, video art, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and audio-based projects could take a building a wide network of curators with their fingers on the pulse of developments in these fields. To help connect international creators with those of us wanting easier access to what’s new and compelling, two artists and two former gallerists and current art fair directors have collaborated on a new app that delivers new exhibitions of cutting-edge works, some still in progress, every month.

Activatar, an iOS app-based platform hosting curated media art projects, presents its inaugural exhibition December 1, 2017, featuring artists Johnathan Monaghan, Alex Myers, and artist group Plakookee. Activatar offers a new way to access and engage media art and artists through monthly exhibitions brought directly to your mobile device. The app is free to download and all projects are playable and fully contained within the app. At the beginning of each month, Activatar will host three new artist projects working with augmented reality, virtual reality, videos, audio-based projects, video games and more. The Activatar app will be available to the general public for download beginning December 1, 2017, on iTunes, but you can try it early by downloading the app here onto your iPhone or iPad (iOS 11 is required).

Christopher Manzione, artist and Co-Founder of Activatar, explains that, “Activatar will deliver works of new media artists from a range of disciplines directly into your pocket. We want to provide access to new practices and ideas in media artwork to audiences across multiple domains and the public at large.” For the artists, Activatar is a way to share ideas that may still be progress or to help promote an event or exhibition they’re in. Jonathan Monaghan, for example, who has an excerpt of new work in the inauguaral exhibition, has a concurrent solo show at New York’s Bitforms Gallery. Participating artists Justin Plakas and Rachel Debuque (of the artist group, Plakookee) explain that working on Boxing Bears in Space, the piece they have in Activatar’s first exhibition “ has been a really exciting experience for us. It has allowed us to take elements of our digital practice and merge it with our physical installation and sculptural work. Our work always contains elements of physical vs. virtual / ‘real’ vs. fake and AR really allows us to start investigating that in new and exciting ways.”

Activatar was founded and is run by artists Christopher Manzione and Nicholas O’Brien, and by Murat Orozobekov and Edward Winkleman, co-directors of the Moving Image art fair. Activatar’s inaugural exhibition, December 1--31, 2017, includes:

Boxing Bears in Space, an augmented reality installation by Plakookee
Plakookee is a creative collaboration between Justin Plakas and Rachel Debuque. They are artists and designers who combine sculpture, installation, constructed photography and new media work. Their art often incorporates synthetic and man-made materials in bold colors and patterns that push the boundaries of color, space and form with a digital approach. Boxing Bears in Space brings together the look and feel of their physical sculpture with some of their research interests: deep space, the circus and comedic performance.

No Longer Dead, a video excerpt by Jonathan Monaghan
Jonathan Monaghan works across a range of media, including prints, sculpture, and animated video to produce otherworldly objects and narratives. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, such as historical artworks and science fiction, his works seem to elicit subconscious anxieties associated with technology and consumerism. Past exhibitions and screenings of his work include The Sundance Film Festival, The Walters Museum of Art, and The Frist Center for the Visual Arts. Monaghan is represented by Bitforms Gallery in New York and Galerie 22,48m2 in Paris.

Eat All The Things, an art game by Alex Myers
Constant experimentation and research fuel Myers’s work in breaking images and systems in order to return them to an alternative form of assembly. Eat All the Things explores ideas of digital anthropophagy and productive misinterpretations. The ingesting and remixing of culture to make more culture.