OPENING SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17TH, 6 – 9PM @ BABYCASTLES
REVERSE and Babycastles are pleased to present their joint exhibition “Postdigital Ecosystems”, featuring works by art collectives Refrakt and Exonemo. The exhibition explores how the increasing digitalization of our everyday life, marked by the emergence of various new visual manifestations and the constant flow of data from and into our multiple screens like smartphones, computers, televisions, and billboards. These new dynamics have taken on their own lives becoming a seemingly autonomous ecosystems. We are connected even when we are offline, and whereas ubiquity used to be a quality of gods, it now seems to be a demand for mere humans in our networked society
The works in “Postdigital Ecosystems” look at the exchanges between the physical world and the digital world, questioning the boundaries between our biological reality and the technological virtuality. Exonemo and Refrakt examine how the lines between the physical world and the ether of the web are moving and blurring, while visualizing the overlaps between the digital and the analog. We might even wonder if the physical world is becoming an interface to the digital world.
The paradigm shift in technology has changed social values as well as every aspect of our ways of perception. Whereas there used to be an obvious difference between reality and virtual reality, these boundaries have started to blur and converging into eventually will make way to one big mixed reality. With smart technology and artificial intelligence having found its way into our homes and most intimate fields of our life, its overall role for society changed. In today’s world of constant connectedness, logging out has become an irregularity. We not only consume information and content but very actively participate, interact and generate more content. The user has become a participator. The exhibition puts the viewer in the spotlight while visualizing the ubiquitous digital space.
“Building Castles in the Cloud” is an augmented reality installation by Refrakt that explores the notion of constantly building castles in the cloud, always logged into digital space. The perfect world that contains our dreams and hopes is a romanticized version of the physical world we live in. Not only do we construct an artificial world, but also digital versions of ourselves inhabiting it.
“Refrakt”is an augmented reality app developed by the homonymous artists, enabling the viewer to perceive alternate realities in a virtual space by scanning real-life objects. He gets confronted with his own digital alter ego embedded into artifacts of a hyperreal paradise.
Exonemo will feature a selection of old and new work that reflects on how nowadays the Internet, networked 24/7 via smart phones, permeates our lives. Throughout our living space, the virtual screen and the actual space overlap indiscriminately. We are expected to function within this reality overlap, such as demonstrated so well by Pokemon Go. As the blurring continues, and it certainly will, we will come to question where our physical bodies lie, and where our hearts lie. For Exonemo screens are membranes between the actual and the information/ digital realms, and therefore, they explore the transference, intersections, and paradoxes between the informational and the material (including corporeal), through means including painting directly on screens.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Refrakt is formed by Carla Streckwall, Alexander Govoni and Michael Schröder. The digital space is ubiquitous, yet invisible to the naked human eye. Refrakt is a virtual museum revealing this increasingly relevant part of our daily lives and social interactions. By crossing the boundaries of physical space, various objects of all kinds of media play with the viewer’s perception of parallel realities. The devices used become an apparatus for this new world and lets the viewer interact with his immediate surroundings. While scanning real-life objects, the viewer will perceive alternate realities in a virtual space.
The artist unit e x o n e m o was formed in 1996 by AKAIWA Yae and SEMBO Kensuke. Their experimental projects are typically humorous and innovative explorations of the paradoxes of digital and analog computer networked and actual environments in our lives. Their The Road Movie won the Golden Nica for Net Vision category at Prix Ars Electronica 2006. They have been organizing the IDPW gatherings and “Internet Yami-Ichi” since 2012. They live and work in New York and are members of the first museum-led incubator NEW INC since 2015.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Helena Acosta is a Venezuelan New Media Art curator, based in New York. Her work investigates and promotes social projects that take place within digital cultures. As curator, producer and creative director, she navigates the lines between art and activism. Her curatorial projects have received awards from Tokyo Wonder Site in Japan and the Generalitat of Catalunya in Spain. Helena is Cofounder of “Dismantling The Simulation,” a collective for visual activism and guerrilla actions that seek to question and dismantle the different discourses, events and information distribution schemes operating within Venezuela.
Andrea Wolf is a Chilean-born interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. She creates multimedia installations that explore the relationship between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. Andrea is the founder of REVERSE, a non profit art platform for the development of new ideas and interdisciplinary practices, promoting peer to peer knowledge exchange. Run by artists, REVERSE’s mission is to support innovative and boundary breaking projects that foster dialogue and artistic collaboration at the intersection of art, science and technology.
Joe Salina is a New York based Video Games Art curator. One of the founders of BabyCastles a collective with roots in New York’s D.I.Y. culture dedicated to building platforms for diversity in video games culture at every level from creators to consumers, connecting the independent game developer community with the broader New York art community, identifying exciting new voices in game creation from around the world and providing them exposure to new audiences.
Postdigital Ecosystems will open on Saturday, September 17th, 6pm at Babycastles, located 137 West 14th St, 2nd Floor. For more information email: info@reversespace.org or meow@babycastles.com
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OPENING THURSDAY, APRIL 14TH, 7PM – 9PM
RSVP REQUIRED
FIREFOX RECOMMENDED – Read instructions to connect
BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES: THE PRIVACY PARADOX is a group show curated by Helena Acosta and Miyö Van Stenis featuring work by Jennifer Lyn Morone, Heather Dewey Hagborg, LaTurbo Avedon, Annie Rose Malamet and Carla Gannis. The exhibited work will live on a wireless network accessible through five routers at the gallery space. The routers have been hacked and are not actually connected to the Internet. Each router has a private network, which visitors must login to through their own devices – cell phones or iPads – to view the artwork. BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES: THE PRIVACY PARADOX explores the dichotomy between the private and the public, creating a platform for distribution of data on an independent and anonymous network.
In the era of algorithm prediction all our online actions have a digital trace, which are used by companies and governments to predict our behaviors. The Internet’s purpose is to collect and quantify each action – becoming a medium for surveillance.
Everyday online social practices could look like harmless actions through a naive eye, but they contain the potential for unexpected consequences when they are traced and connected to algorithmic surveillance systems. In less than five years facial recognition algorithms will be ubiquitous. For example, Facebook has recently added facial recognition technology to their platform, becoming more deeply integrated into our smartphones. These new applications will facilitate easy reconstruction of any random encounter we have on the street that has been captured by a camera.
And even though our increased communication practices on the Social Web result in an increase of personal information online, the ‘Privacy Paradox’* suggests that despite Internet users’ apprehension about privacy, their behaviors do not reflect those concerns. Although we keep insisting on how much we care about our data, the statement ‘privacy is important!’ has become a void belief in our contemporary society.
*In a study into the matter of The Privacy Paradox, researchers created two fictitious online shops. One of the shops demanded less personal data from their customers, but the DVDs on sale cost one euro more than in the second shop, which wanted to know a lot more about its customers. Almost all users picked the cheaper store. Even when the prices were the same in both shops, only half of the subjects chose the privacy-friendly variety. Apparently, we are not willing to pay a price for privacy. The costs of privacy are virtually zero.
Monika Taddicken, Institute of Journalism and Communication Research (Hamburg, Germany: University of Hamburg).
A router is a networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks. Routers perform the “traffic directing” functions on the Internet. By hacking them, the exhibition is reinforcing this idea of the privacy paradox, erasing the router’s predetermined function and transforming it into a device that offers a private experience. The hacking process of this exhibition is powered by Occupy.here an open source project developed by Dan Phiffer in 2011.
Annie Rose Malamet’s ‘Hooker Meditation Exercise’ is a video art piece that examines anonymity, fear, and visibility in relation to sex work. Malamet uses her own advertisements, client voicemails, and original footage to create a narrative about the anxiety of being discovered and to reflect on her own identity.
In ‘Electronic Graveyard No.2’ Carla Gannis explores the collision of traditional self portraiture in fine art and social media’s selfie culture. Gannis creates a distopic futuristic Graveyard where digital identity and daily online practices live forever on the collective memory of the social web; where even after we are dead, our privacy can still be exposed.
Heather Dewey Hagborg works at the intersection of art and science, placing an emphasis on conceptions of the natural and the artificial. ‘Stranger Visions’ is a series of portrait sculptures created from genetic material collected in public places by the artist. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey Hagborg calls attention to the developing technology of forensic DNA phenotyping and the potential for a culture of biological surveillance.
Jennifer Lyn Morone affirms “I am a data slave and so are you.” Morone uses ethics and economic reasoning to create a business model, where she is the corporation that owns her own data. Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc is a hyper capitalistic model, where Morone over exposes her data in order to protect and capitalize it. For the exhibition, the curators have selected to show Jennifer’s data from their first contact with her up until the moment of the exhibition.
In ‘ID,’ LaTurbo Avedon visualizes the attributes that she has acquired in virtual space. Using data like facial detection markers and her lifted fingerprints, she reveals the process of creating personal metadata for the identification of a digital self.
BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES: THE PRIVACY PARADOX will open on Thursday, April 14th from 7pm – 9pm at REVERSE. As space is limited, RSVP is required for the event. RSVP here, and remember to bring your fully charged devices and headphones to the opening. BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES: THE PRIVACY PARADOX will be on view through May 14th. The project space will be open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1pm – 7pm and for extra gallery hours Friday, April 15th and Saturday, April 16th from 2pm – 7pm. The curator Helena Acosta will be at the space at this time to talk about the exhibition.
As part of the programming activities for the exhibition, REVERSE will host a panel discussion at Creative Tech Week on May 4th, Post Privacy: Is privacy becoming a thing of the past?.
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Install FireFox Browser on your mobile device. BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES is an exhibition hosted in an OpenWrt router. The interface works better using Firefox, however if you use Android you can use the default browser of the operating system called Internet.
2. Open your Wi-Fi preferences on your mobile device.
3. Select one of the 5 private networks named:
BI/ Carla Gannis
BI/ Heather Dewey-Hagborg
BI/ Annie Rose Malamet
BI/ LaTurbo Avedon
BI/ Jeniffer Lyn Morone
4. If the page doesn’t open automatically, open Firefox and type http://beautiful.interfaces or http://beautiful.interfaces/privacyparadox (to go directly to the HOME page) or scan the QR code provided at the exhibition.
5. Welcome! You’re connected to the network of BEAUTIFUL INTERFACES. Click below the title to visualize the artist’s work of the network you selected.
6. Navigate through the exhibition with the Menu.
7. To visualize a different artist, go to your Wi-Fi preferences and change the network. Please make sure you close the browser app to reset the session information.
8. Go back to the HOME page of the exhibition interface and enjoy the new artist.
OPENING FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 7PM – 9PM
Art:Work, curated by Jessica Gallucci, is a group exhibition featuring artists who critique, comment upon or subvert systems of labor, commerce or entertainment, often from the inside by going undercover, operating as non-artists in those arenas, or by adopting occupational frameworks native to those systems. It includes works from Jeremy Hutchison, Liz Magic Laser, PJ Linden, Sarah Alice Moran, Narcissister, Sarah Stuve and Philip Vanderhyden.
Much of the art in this exhibition relates to the scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson’s definition of occupational realism: work “in which the realm of waged labor (undertaken to sustain oneself economically) and the realm of art (pursued, presumably, for reasons that might include financial gain, but that also exceed financialization and have aesthetic, personal, and/or political motivations) collapse, becoming indistinct or intentionally inverted. These are performances in which artists enact the normal, obligatory tasks of work under the highly elastic rubric of ‘art.’ Here, the job becomes the art and the art becomes the job.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Jeremy Hutchison is a British artist based in London. Having studied linguistics and written advertising for Coca-Cola, he received a distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He constructs situations that disrupt the power relations encoded in consumer capitalism. Recent work has been exhibited at ICA, London; Modern Art Oxford; V&A Museum, London; Z33, Hasselt; Kunstverein, Weisbaden; Saatchi New Sensations, London; Rurart, Poiters; Galeri Mana, Istanbul; Paradise Row, London and Southbank Centre, London. He recently concluded the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is currently artist in residence at [space], London.
Liz Magic Laser lives and works in Brooklyn. Her performances and videos intervene in semi-public spaces such as bank vestibules, movie theaters and newsrooms and have involved collaborations with actors, dancers, surgeons and motorcycle gang members. Her recent work appropriates the dominant performance techniques and psychological strategies used by the media and politicians to sway public opinion. Laser earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Recently, her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas and Mälmo Konsthall, Mälmo, Sweden.
PJ Linden and Sarah Stuve are a Brooklyn-based artist-filmmaker duo working under the name Wonderpuss Octopus. Together, they have collaborated on a range of commercial and fine-art film and video projects.
Sarah Alice Moran is a painter and a native New Yorker. She received a B.A. in fine art and art history from Bowdoin College and an M.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer working at the intersection of performance, dance, art and activism. Narcissister’s work integrates prior professional dance and commercial art experience with long-standing visual art practices in a range of media including photography, video and experimental music. She has presented work at The New Museum, PS1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center and in many nightclubs, galleries, alternative spaces and international exhibitions.
Philip Vanderhyden is an artist living and working in New York. Vanderhyden earned an MFA from Northwestern University in 2004 and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2001. Vanderhyden has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. His work and projects have been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, and The New York Times, among others. Vanderhyden recently concluded a three-year project of forensically reconstructing the work of the late artist Gretchen Bender at venues such as The Poor Farm in Little Wolf, Wisconsin and The Kitchen in New York. He also participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His most recent video works, “Pay Your Future Self First” and “Volatility Smile” have been shown at Southfirst Gallery and Signal Gallery in New York, and Artspace, Sydney among others.
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OPENING SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, 7PM – 9PM
Featuring work by Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Giselle Zatonyl, Leo Castaneda, Eva Papamargariti and Sebastian Schmieg. Curated by Helena Acosta.
UNCANNY explores 3D virtual environments where the dialectic relation between the viewer and the image creates immersive experiences that oscillate between real and virtual space. As Lev Manovich states, “the visual language in our modern period is characterized by the existence of another virtual space, another three-dimensional world enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space”. Through the work of five artistic approaches involving worlds of futuristic fiction, UNCANNY progressively takes us from the idea of visual environments to the physical sensorial experience of them – in Manovich’s words, from the screen to screenless.
Alfredo Salazar-Caro’s “Triptych AKA Miami Booty Bass” is a study of classic portraiture translated with 21st century tools. It re-examines the masterpiece Sagrada Familia con ángel músico, Santa Catalina de Alejandría, Santa Bárbara, (1510–1520) from the anonymous painter simply known as Master of Frankfurt. Using 3D modeling software and motion capture to portray iconographic forms of churches and drones, “Miami Booty Bass” adds a new footnote to a millennium-old conversation.
“Alien ship” by Giselle Zatonyl invites the viewer to navigate a futuristic fantasy; a 3D virtual space with clear references from videogames and science fiction. Experimenting with digital textures and volume, Zatonyl creates an uncanny environment where a digital sculptural entity, a luxury machine, looms over organic forms merging into water.
In ¨RandomAccessData¨, Eva Papamargariti creates a dialectical narration between visual and verbal references that explores the role of search engines and tagging in cyberspace. Streams of data and information coalesce into a tag cloud made up of random thoughts about post-internet art, radical utopian groups of the ’60s, and today’s virtual reality tools. A surreal territory unfolds as a voiceover makes uncanny references about concepts like distribution and reproduction of images, data flow, immersive experiences and the Internet, real identities versus digital identities in cyberspace.
Leo Castaneda explores physical experiences of virtual reality. “Item 93201” is a multilayered piece that merges the virtual with the real. A large futuristic sculptural piece inhabits the gallery and functions as a bridge between the virtual and real space. Through a VR headset embedded in the sculpture the viewer can enter an augmented reality environment, a setting conflicted between luxury and oddity. As the viewer navigates this space he encounters elements of the physical in the virtual, objects like the sculpture itself and a painting that also hangs in the gallery. Now the virtual and the actual unfold in an intertwined dialogue, which space is actually mirroring the other?
“81 Points of View (Autoplay)” by Sebastian Schmieg is media-archaeological sculpture that proposes a setup which overlaps perceived with virtual reality. Utilizing old and obsolete technology, it is disconnected from the common notion of technological progress. 81 Points of View (Autoplay) operates in between modern devices that implement augmented reality, and optical machines invented centuries ago. Where as media technology becomes smaller and eventually invisible, the piece turns that development up-side-down: due to its transparent setup, the sculpture‘s mode of operation turns out to be the actual subject matter. Schmieg combined modern devices that create augmented realities with antiquated ones that create more basic optical illusions, drawing a line through centuries of experimentation with mediated reality.
As part of the exhibition programming for UNCANNY Alfredo Salazar-Caro will be teaching a workshop at REVERSE, Intro to VR and Video Games, on Saturday, September 26th & Sunday, September 27th.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Alfredo Salazar-Caro (b. Mexico, 1989) is a multimedia artist, currently based in Chicago. He works with sculpture and digital media including video, animated gifs, and virtual reality. Through these mediums Alfredo explores phenomenology, identity, memory, and time. Of these concepts, time and memory have become most central to his artistic practice, manifesting themselves as digital avatars and virtual reconstructions of environment. Alfredo Salazar-Caro has exhibited nationally and internationally in cities such as Dallas, Chicago, New York, Toronto, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and in his hometown Mexico City.
Giselle Zatonyl (b. Argentina, 1986) is a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary artist and curator. Her work explores new technologies to create immersive digital environments with video and sculpture. Zatonyl received a BFA in Photography and Art History from New World School of Arts in Miami, FL. In 2014 she was awarded a residency at Culture Hub to continue her research on systems, mechanisms, and interaction at the intersection science, technology, and art. She has exhibited her work internationally, most recently appearing in venues such as the Oude Kerk (Amsterdam) MDC Museum of Art + Design (Miami, FL), White Zinfidel (Brazil), ŠKVER (Croatia), and little berlin (Philadelphia, PA).
Eva Papamargariti (b. Greece, 1987) is an architect and digital artist, currently based in London. Her projects focus on time-based media, digital installations, video and gif animations. She is interested in the creation of 2D/3D digital spaces, forms and geometries which can provoke different concepts, narrations and atmospheres each time, using a variety of methods, tools and programs. She has exhibited group and individual projects in cities like Athens, New York, Seattle, Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lima, Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh, Dublin, Antwerp and also on the Internet at Panther Modern, ANIGIF, 15Folds, Channel Normal, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale, Eternal Internet Brotherhood, Cloaque.org, #0000FF Gallery and Decenter.
Leo Castaneda (b. Colombia,1988) is an artist based in Miami and New York working in the intersection of painting and virtual reality. He also works with drawing, interactive sculpture, and animation to analyze and deconstruct the structures of video-games, and how these structures relate to those of Art and the world at large. Castaneda received his BFA from Cooper Union and his MFA from Hunter College. In 2014 Castaneda received a scholarship from the Cisneros Foundation to attend SOMA Summer in Mexico City.
Sebastian Schmieg (b. Germany,1983) is a Berlin-based artist who works with found materials and custom software to create pieces that examine the way modern technologies shape online and offline realities. Schmieg continuously questions the notion of a linear technological progress in artworks that range from books to algorithmic videos. His work has been exhibited at Bitforms Gallery, New York, USA; Transmediale, Berlin, Germany; and Impakt Festival, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
UNCANNY will open on Saturday, September 12th from 7 – 9pm at REVERSE. The exhibition will be on view until September 26th.
VINCULA; a bond signifying union or unity
CLOSING RECEPTION FRIDAY, JULY 24TH, 7 – 8:30PM
REVERSE is happy to host the SVA MFA in Art Practice thesis show this year, VINCULA, featuring the work of Lou Woods and Tina Chavera. The exhibition will be on view at REVERSE from July 16th through July 24th.
Over time spent in the gallery and moments shared with visitors, this exhibition will be a cumulative display of participatory action. Through interactivity, viewers are invited to contribute and shape this shared visual landscape.
Lou Woods diverts explorations of selfhood outward by asking the viewer, “If I take your crumbs, will you take my hunger?” and seeks viewer action in exchange for access to a private library.
Tina Chavera invites the viewer to engage in learning a new craft and add to a growing community exchange. “If I share my craft with you, will you share some of your time?”
Both artists will be present in the gallery for selected times during this exhibition, building up to a final closing reception that celebrates the physical culmination of artist-viewer interaction.
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OPENING FRIDAY, JUNE 19TH, 7 – 9PM, REVERSE will present, for the first time in New York, four Cincinnati-based artists working on the objectification of time and memory.
Consciousness is endlessly grasping for objects as moment boxes. Yet there is an important etymological distinction between our contemporary understanding of memento (commonly misspelled momento)—a French souvenir, which can take the form of anything from a cheap snow globe to an interesting rock—and memento mori, which symbolized the medieval practice of reflecting on mortality and the transient nature of the universe. It is in the gap between these two definitions of the same term that the exhibition MOMENTO / MEMENTO operates, as Joe Hedges, Jacob Lynn, Corrina Mehiel, and Christy Wittmer work to acknowledge an objectified attachment to moments in time.
MOMENTO / MEMENTO was one of the selected projects from our 2014 cycle of Open Call for Curatorial Proposals. While MOMENTO / MEMENTO features four Cincinnati, Ohio-based artists, the themes are universal; Hedges’ digital paintings present ambiguous artifacts of science and technology; Lynn’s embroidered works explore family history and sexuality; Mehiel’s photos document the performative nature of identity; and Wittmer’s formal ceramic structures waver elegantly between austere and ornate. The contemporary mementos (in the form of art-objects) in the exhibition, like mementos of history, function across dimensions of time and culture.
Joe Hedges‘ digital prints reference the language of still-life product photography but include unmarketable situations; the handles of hairdryers, geologic specimens, frayed wires and plant parts are rearranged into new configurations that re-imbue the objects with a sense of arcane function and meaning. “This epistemological confusion is at the heart of my work as an artist: How do individuals and groups imbue objects with meaning? What kinds of objects qualify as meaning-containers? I make images that question the image itself while also serving as reminders—mementos—to celebrate the wonder, magic, and possibility of experiment and representation generally.”
Artist Corrina Mehiel explores community interdisciplinary practice in her art and teaching. “I’ve been on a migratory path of mid-sized post-industrial cities all my life. Longing for a home and holding onto objects as memory placeholders has lead to an investigation of this idea of momento in my work. In this photo series, Tree Hugger, I am attempting to embody my mother by wearing her clothes. She spent her life planting trees, perhaps knowing they would outlive her. Since her death, trees have become a sort of memento of her life for me.”
Fiber artist Jacob Lynn’s work makes use of traditional crafts to explore gender and identity in America. In Lynn’s words, “the subversive nature of embroidery made by men asks questions of American gender roles that coordinate with the internal discourse that I have with my own queer gender identity.” For MOMENTO / MEMENTO, Lynn will present framed fabric works embroidered with craigslist.org missed connection advertising. These pieces explore the boundary between moments in physical time and space, in internet space, and in the long processes of needlepoint and embroidery. These momentos are connected to “conversations that shape the realization of identity,” calling attention to how our identities are altered by incidental moments in time.
Finally, Christy Wittmer’s ceramic work references the preciousness of objects. Sometimes objects she finds during her travels become part of her works. These found objects are displayed, casted or remade, carrying a trace of their history on the surface. She explains, “Weathered, anonymous, used and unspectacular. I prefer these kinds of objects that do not connect me to their previous owners, but rather to myself and the intrinsic value of being worn and experienced, allowing the memento’s history to resonate with the viewer.”
The opening event will feature music by Australian DJ and artist HEINE. Take a listen here.
]]>“And what is the purpose of writing music? … The answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”
— John Cage (Silence: Lectures and Writings)
OPENING FRIDAY, MAY 8TH, 7 – 9 PM, REVERSE will present two interactive, experimental artists’ projects that employ novel technologies to mediate, augment and echo our experience of the world around us. Their effects are both trans-sensory—as shapes become sounds—and revelatory—as brain waves become both audible and visible. The result, in both cases, is a strange new music.
Lisa Park’s Eunoia II, which she has developed at the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator, is an investigation into a new form of expression and shared experience by visually reflecting the vibrations of the mind on the surface of water. Spreading across the floor in the rear of the gallery, a networked group of 48 speakers – all containing pools of water – are connected via Bluetooth to electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, which are worn by up to two visitors at once. The EEG headsets track changes in visitors’ brainwaves, and the data is sent to a computer, where custom-written code is used to calibrate volume, pitch and panning, and translate those values into sound. The audio output is played through the speakers, causing distinctive ripples and vertical spray in the trays of water resting atop each speaker. The result is an audio-visualization of participants’ emotions, with the potential to see the real-time synchronization of individuals’ brain activity as they respond to neurofeedback. Colin Harrington and Amar Lal contributed to Eunoia II as an audio engineer and a sound programmer, respectively.
Park will also introduce a mobile application that creates custom data visualizations based upon individuals’ experiences with the EEGs. The app is in development with programmer Ji-Hyun Lee as part of Eudaimonia, the next iteration of this project.
Danish-born artists Louise Foo and Martha Skou present Format No. 1 for the first time in the United States, following its March debut in Copenhagen. Their stark geometric wall sculptures in the front of the gallery form a striking visual tableau that also functions as a score. Visitors can scan the walls using a specially designed smartphone application, created in collaboration with programmer Johann Diedrick, that translates visual information to sound. The image-to-sound algorithm used in the application, and the three-dimensional score itself, are organized around a time vs. frequency methodology, in keeping with traditional sound mapping techniques. The wall is an open score meant to allow the participant an intuitive, personal and transformative experience.
About the Artists
Lisa Park has an MPA in interactive telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Park is a current member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s first museum-led incubator in art, technology and design. She was recently awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts 2014 fellowship in the category of Digital/Electronic Arts.
Louise Foo holds an MPS in interactive telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a 2012 recipient of a Fulbright Ministry of Culture Award. She is a current fellow, with Marth Skou, at the New York Art Residency And Studios Foundation. The duo will begin a residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn later in 2015.
Martha Skou holds an MA in visual communication from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. She is a current fellow, with Louise Foo, at the New York Art Residency And Studios Foundation. The duo will begin a residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn later in 2015.
Read more about SYNAESTHETICS featured in Hyperallergic, Bedford + Bowery and The Creators Project.
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OPENING FRIDAY APRIL 10TH, 7 – 9PM
REVERSE is pleased to present MYTH AND MUTATIONS, curated by Chris Romero. MYTH AND MUTATIONS features six artists that combine symbols of the past with subject matter found in contemporary culture including emojis, memes, video games, and consumer products. The artists demonstrate that mythologies forever transform, coalesce, and split into new allegories. However, as these allegories undergo certain metamorphic changes, they acquire a close relation to present-day desires, fears, truths, and morals. On display is a diverse range of mediums including video installation, animation, illustration, and 3D printed sculpture.
Richie Brown’s “Brown Magick Oracle Deck” is a series of fortune cards featuring icons from traditional oracle decks – a vase, a sword – mixed with images chosen by the artist – an alien, Santa Claus, googly eyed poo. During the exhibition Brown will provide readings, create new cards, and explain how to perform readings. The film “Over the Rainbow” by Rachel MacLean features a hyper-glowing rainbow filled world inhabited by cuddly monsters and gruesome pop divas. Shot entirely in green screen with Maclean as the sole performer, divergent iconographies merge together presenting a dark parody of a fairy tale and horror movie genres.
Jonathan Monaghan’s “The Checkpoint” series of prints is a reimagining of Albrecht Durer’s 15th century woodcut “The Triumphal Arch“. Rather than featuring griffons or heraldic crests akin to Durer’s woodcut, Monaghan’s architectural structure is comprised of security cameras, video game weaponry, and floating Whole Foods logos. The miniature theater-box-video installations, “Laid in Earth” and “La Medea (TV)” by Yara Travieso, observe Greek tragedies, spectacles, and the void. “Laid In Earth” (in collaboration with Mira Lehr) is a reimagining of the opera “Dido and Aeneas” by Henry Purcell, whereas “La Medea (TV)” adapts Euripides’ myth, “Medea”, as a Latin American variety show.
“Ambient Occlusion” a series of 3D printed sculptures by Wang Yefeng combines and breaks apart the human figure, American automobiles and beasts of Chinese and Greco-Roman fables. The figures, posed in classical Renaissance form also contain attributes of the Chinese dragon and the centaur. In the video animation “Red Ginseng” Yaloopop‘s virtual landscape features pink creatures performing the Citizen Health Workout Routine, designed by the South Korean government to enhance national well-being for the next thousand years. Inspired by the rumored cure-all qualities of Red Ginseng, the creatures perform their routine amongst flowing streams of pink-hued ginseng hinting at a thirst for immortality.
An essay and glossary of iconographic references will accompany the exhibition.
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OPENING FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27TH, 7 – 9 PM
REVERSE is pleased to present SEASTEAD AT NIGHT, a new exhibition by artist Victor Liu. Inspired by a real-life initiative to build ‘seasteads‘, or floating city-states in the oceans, the exhibition is a meditation on several intertwined themes: the desire for alternatives to the nation-state, utopia as a business proposal, and sociopolitical fashion as a culmination of the neoliberal project.
In the words of the artist:
“I came across this idea for building floating cities in the oceans. Shining cities in the seas, havens for the disaffected, the libertarians, the communitarians, whatever your stripe, just not your poor, tired, huddled masses (since the helicopter fees are killer). Imagine experiments in living, making your own government, each city in competition, in a free market of societies. It seemed to me the perfect expression of a neoliberal utopia. I felt the temperature rising a couple degrees, like a global warming of temperaments and ideological stances. This became the setting for a fable.”
The exhibition at REVERSE is presented as a kind of World’s Fair in the future, in a world being populated by seasteads. The installation includes three sets of work. The first is a video beacon floating in a pool in the back room, and on its skin plays an infomercial for the seasteading life. This video relies on a heavy use of stock photos and PowerPoint transitions, the tools of a crack corporate marketing team. The geodesic domes in the front room call to mind the work of Buckminster Fuller, a forerunner in designing seaborne cities. Presented as seastead proposals, they evoke the utopian dreams and aspirations, yet are literally tied down by various objects which encourage allegorical readings about unacknowledged baggage behind the seasteading initiative. The last set of work incorporates flags for new seastead tribes, where animals playfully stand in for tribal identity. The return to tribal affiliations marks the end of an imagined fable.
Victor Liu is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His art making is motivated by the question of how art relates to society, and in particular, how art can create spaces to see ourselves and to think about our times. He is a recent graduate of the MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, with previous degrees at Yale University and UC Berkeley. His artwork has been shown internationally, and he was a recipient of a NYFA fellowship in 2005.
As part of the exhibition programming for SEASTEAD AT NIGHT, Utopia School will be hosting 2 classes at REVERSE- Utopian Response to Ecocrises? on Saturday, March 14th and Architectures of Desire: Seasteads and Nomadic Flows on Saturday, March 21st.
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OPENING FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24TH, 7 – 9 PM
REVERSE is pleased to host Cecilia Avendaño’s first solo show in New York. BLOW confronts us with disturbingly beautiful portraits, which are both seductive and unsettling. The exhibition consists of large-scale, digitally manipulated photographs printed on canvas, representative of the gross mediation of advertisement and technology in today’s elaboration of personal identity.
The portrait photographs are made with a digital technique whereby selected elements from a base of previously photographed models by the artist are merged to create beings. Thus, even though they are born from a portion of reality, in their final version, they exist as forms that escape strict mimicry.
Just as disturbing as their beauty, is the fact that these inanimate women-girls appear to breathe, as the canvases slowly plunge into movement by means of a mechanical system implanted behind the portraits. In this way, the images physically move, taking a step further from their reality, escaping almost imperceptibly from their frames.
Avendaño’s images seem to come from an existentialist comic cut, but as fictional as they might appear, they hold truth in presenting themselves as what they are: overly staged combinations of eyes, mouths, skin, and hair; ultimately, images becoming images. These works tell several stores that emerge from a face, one that sometimes seems stereotypical and sometimes tangible, and move in that thin line between dream and reality.
Cecilia Avendaño graduated from the University of Chile, studying Visual Arts and majoring in Photography. She has exhibited her work since 2002, participating in numerous group exhibitions in Chile and abroad. Selected solo shows include Sala Cero at Animal Gallery, National Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Chile, Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires Argentina, and her participation at BAC! Festival in Barcelona’s MACBA. Her most recent work involves digital post production operations on photography where she composes images that become portraits, but operate with different concepts relating to identity construction. She has been selected two times for the Chilean National Fund for Arts FONDART, and was awarded second place in the art contest “Artists of the XXI Century” organized by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Banco Santander. She currently lives and works in Santiago, Chile.
