SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The Contemporary Jewish Museum is presenting the work of nine Bay Area digital artists and artistic teams in NEAT: New Experiments in Art and Technology, an original exhibition that looks at the rapidly evolving relationship between artists and technology almost 50 years since the seminal 1960s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) set out to break down barriers between artists and scientists and expand the artist’s role in social developments related to new technologies. The exhibition, curated by Chief Curator Renny Pritikin with consultation from artist Paolo Salvagione, includes several digital and robotic sculptures as well as works in light, sound, video, and more by three generations of practitioners working at the crossroad of contemporary art and tech including Jim Campbell, Paul De Marinis, Gabriel Dunne with Vishal K Dar, Mary Franck, Alan Rath, Paolo Salvagione, Micah Elizabeth Scott, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback.
“In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the role of artist and engineer has merged,” says Pritikin. “Programming is understood as a new tool for artists to create work, just like a paintbrush or pencil, and with the understanding that interdisciplinary thinking is inherent to individual makers now. The Bay Area has been and continues to be the most vital center for such work in the world. This exhibition is a celebration of the artist-engineering aesthetic and the Bay Area’s role in fostering it.”
Executive Director Lori Starr adds, “NEAT is an expression of the Jewish commitment to new forms of knowledge. Judaism is a rabbinic religion. The Hebrew Bible is considered a starting point from which debate has flowed for millennia. There is an inherent evolution of understanding in Jewish thought and, consequently, an acceptance of new information about the world and scientific advancement. This openness to innovation is embedded in The CJM’s mission to engage with cutting edge developments in contemporary art.”
NEAT takes as its inspiration the pioneering 1960s series of projects entitled E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology. E.A.T. was officially launched in 1967 by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. These men had previously collaborated in 1966 when they organized 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performance art presentations that united artists and engineers. Ten New York artists worked with thirty engineers and scientists from the world-renowned Bell Telephone Laboratories to create groundbreaking performances that incorporated new technology.
Now, several decades later, NEAT shifts its gaze to the Bay Area, the contemporary hub for experimentation in digital art forms. The nine participating artists and teams have been commissioned to make new or updated work.
Participating Artists
Paul DeMarinis has been making digital sound sculptures and other works since the mid-seventies and has had an ongoing interest in archaic technologies. For this exhibition, DeMarinis offers Tympanic Alley (2015), a sound installation that refers back to the classic do-it-yourself days of the 1980s when low budgets and modest means were the rule. Simple aluminum pie plates in a gridded and suspended cloud generate staccato percussive sounds when struck by dancing metal shards reacting to interruptions in the flow of an electronic signal. The echoes of the sound, and the clicks of the breaking current in the associated loudspeakers, in addition to the otoacoustic (internal ear-originated) emissions, create a complex soundscape suggestive of falling rain or faint and faraway marches.
Jim Campbell explores the limits of visual perception by widely separating individual pixels of moving images and is interested in how the brain will compose narratives from the most minimal of signals from LED sources. Campbell has done a series of curtain-like works that use individual pixels to project found home movies onto white walls. For NEAT, he presents a new work, Broken Movie (2015), that offers an innovation: the mural-scale projection will be augmented by a number of strategically placed pixels that will extend the moving image to adjoining walls, creating a sense of almost three dimensional, inclusive space to the piece, as the gap between pixels is pushed even further apart and onto perpendicular walls.
Alan Rath was among the very first artists to store images using ROM technology. He also has had a growing and long-term interest in robotics and kinetic sculpture. His four robotic figures in the exhibition, Soon (2015), Four Eyes (2006), Voyeur III (2007), and Forever (2012), parody artificial intelligence fantasies and decorative notions of art practice while, at the same time, demonstrating the enormous potential of digitized machine behavior.
Camille Utterback makes interactive video projects that track the movement of viewers and transforms that information into abstract and evolving painting-like projections. For NEAT, she works for the first time with evanescent, multi-layered scrims as projection material. The work is an attempt by the artist to have viewers not only interacting with the computer program, but also facing each other on the other side of the scrim, jointly creating a two sided, transparent image.
Scott Snibbe was one of the first artists to move into the burgeoning field of applications for phones and tablets. His piece REWORK_ (2012), created with collaborator Lukas Girling, allows the viewer to interact with remixes of Philip Glass’ music using iPad responsive abstract animation to both visualize music and to create original musical compositions in Glass’ early style. The work epitomizes the democratic and anarchic potential of the field.
Paolo Salvagione uses his engineering background to create complex sensory experiences for his viewers. For NEAT, he has created Rope Fountain (2015), a machine using electronics and 3D printing to create eerily alive line drawings in space. Ropes attached to the gizmo flail in space, often forming symmetrical patterns like water ballet.
Gabriel Dunne, Mary Franck, and Micha Elizabeth Scott, the youngest cohort in the exhibition, all work with innovative algorithmic research to create self-generating, evolving installations of light and sound. Dunne, together with collaborator Vishal K Dar, presents NAAG (2012), a large-scale sculpture onto which abstract video animation is projected. The projections move in tandem with the surface segments, creating a mesmerizing rhythm. The piece was originally presented in India. Franck’s Gilded and Unreal (2015) is a small, faceted enclosure, the ceiling of which fills with abstract, layered video that evolves over time. Merging surface and image, it suggests an unidentified but organic, living colony into which visitors may peer. Scott’s Eclipse (2015) is an installation for a contained space in which a suspended globe emits powerful color and resonates with a dirge-like drone.
