I may go to this opening if I feel up to it – it’s called On and Off and here’s the Press Release.

 

The Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to present On and Off a new show featuring an international group of contemporary artists.

Ten years since it emerged as a medium for contemporary art, the Internet, and the work it inspires, is no longer confined by the browser window. The Web influences culture at large: it adapts to new technology, cultivates demographics, and evolves our cultural needs and norms. The works of Vuk Cosic, Lisa Jevbratt, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Thomson & Craighead, and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES are testament to its expanding role in contemporary life.

In ASCII History of Moving Images Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic re-presents key moments in classic films as monochromatic waves of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) characters. Cosic’s use of this universal code to depict Psycho or Battleship Potemkin draws our attention to how culturally specific artifacts are translated and viewed across cultures, both on and off the Web.

The German based artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenscheid also examine issues of cultural translation in their work Online Newspapers. They re-imagine how our world’s newspaper sites would appear if they had been developed not by professional web and graphic designers, but by the lay journalists whose homegrown aesthetics defined the era before the dot-com boom.

Through their work Beacon, the British artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead provide a real-time glimpse of the obsessions of our time by showing us, in a rhythmic, relentless stream, what people are “Googling.” The fragmented phrasing used in search queries is made public and becomes a poetic narrative—sometime shocking, other times mundane—of our culture’s almost tragic longing.

For YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ Travels in Utopia: A Brief History of the Internet, network technology is not only the subject, but also the means of distribution for their text-based narratives. With basic Flash animation, a limited palette of colors and fonts, and a soundtrack of 1960s style bebop, their stories reside somewhere between the novella and cinema and encourage a new type of reading.

Rather than focusing on the output and use of the Internet, Swedish/American artist Lisa Jevbratt looks at its base structure and organization. The Infome Imager works mine the vast database of existing Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Using predetermined guidelines (the date, URL, length of site, or network location for instance) she assigns particular colors and patterns to IPs in a specified range. The results are part portrait, part landscape painting and wholly beautiful and abstract visions of information itself.

Long working at the forefront of the medium, these artists explore the particularities of Web technology and its aesthetics and utility in projects that clearly transcend the specificity of “Internet art.” Internationally renowned and widely exhibited both on line and off these artists offer us compelling insights into our simple, everyday desire to be connected.

Vuk Cosic was the Slovenian representative to the Venice Biennale in 2001 and is the co-founder of Ljudmila — a digital media lab for artists in Slovenia. A pioneer in the medium Cosic has been widely exhibited internationally. He has recently been included in shows at the, Chelsea Art Museum in New York, the ICA in London, Villette Numerique in Paris and ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.

Lisa Jevbratt is a Swedish/American artist and an Assistant Professor in the Media Arts and Technology Program and the Art Department at University of California Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ars Electronica in Linz Austria, and Transmediale in Berlin.

Olia Lialina was born in Russia and now lives and teaches at the Merz Academie in Stuttgart, Germany. Originally a film critic, Lialina is known as the creator of some of the most powerful and influential works of network based art and art criticism. German born Dragan Espenschied is also a lecturer at Merz Academie in Stuttgart. His online work Gravity won the People’s Choice Webby Award in 2004 and he is a core member of the rock band Bodenstandig 2000. Together and separately their work has been shown in numerous online and off line venues including Ars Electronica in Linz Austria, Deitch Projects in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.

Thomson and Craighead are London based artists who work primarily with video, sound and network technologies. Their online, site specific and installation works have been exhibited widely in venues including the Barbican Center and the Tate Modern in London, FACT in Liverpool, the New Museum in New York, SFMOMA in San Francisco, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Villette Numerique in Paris.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES’ two chief officers are Korean born Young-hae Chang (C.E.O) and American born Marc Voge (C.I.O). The primarily Web based artists who live and work in Seoul, South Korea have been included in numerous publications on new media art and have been shown at the New Museum in New York, the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul and ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany.

The Gallery is located at 601 W 26th Street, Suite 1240, New York, NY. The Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6.
 

I was about to go to bed but then realized I really wanted to share the excitement and dedication Pratt Institute has for Eva Zeisel.  I posted last night that I intended to go – now I have the pictures and some stories to tell.

First, the photos. I could not get a good shot of Eva Zeisel, this shot off the video that was playing at the opening was the best, so here it is.  Yes, she’s 100 years old on November 13th.  She looked pretty good, skin tone and movement were OK, she was fully alert – she could kinda get around – what more can you ask for at 100?

Here’s some photos of Eva Zeisel’s ceramics and kitchen utensils.  BTW, Eva Zeisel has a website where you can order originals of her designs and there’s a discount of 10% on orders due to her 100th birthday.

     

Here is a ceramic design that appeared in the 1940’s and the advertisement of the same design that appeared at that time.

Here’s Thumbnails of some more shows linked to the originals.

          

I understand the teapot is Eva Zeisel’s first and only design of this type and it’s selling at Bloomingdales for 80 bucks; a woman who described herself as the owner of the business that created the teapots told me this as she admired the pot.

With the show at Pratt Manhattan there was also a book signing – I should have bought a copy and got it signed, did not end up doing that.  Oh well.

I also ran into old friends, Russel Nelson and his his girlfriend Margaret Casagrande, who I’ve known for a while – also a couple of other people who Russel and Margaret know but I had not met before.  I looked at Russel’s paintings online, and I never really knew he painted.  I can’t tell that much from the photos that he put up, but the point is, you don’t get an idea from Russel that he painted seriously – he’s modest, some people are like that. 

I did not run into an old friend and Pratt Instructor, Linda Lauro, at this opening, though I thought I might. 

One thing that has happened with this show and marketing message – by associating Eva Zeisel with age (turning 100) as strongly or more strongly than her work – the idea of her work being more important than her age is muddled in the message (at least for me). 

I’ll end this evening, exhausted, with one more thought.  Except for meeting Russel and Margaret, I did not know anyone at this Pratt Opening; yet I felt like I should know them and would fit right in.   Does that mean this is the crowd I belong in?   I’m not sure what it means.  I could have sworn that half the people I saw actually looked familar – like I had seen them somewhere before – except I had not seem them before.  

And now it’s time to sign off.

I plan to attend this opening later today:

“Eva Zeisel at 100: A Lifetime of Masterwork in Design“

This exhibition showcases Zeisel’s extraordinary career as a premier designer. The exhibition will showcase nearly 100 objects including ceramics, furniture, glassware, metal and textiles. Eva Zeisel taught at Pratt for 15 years. Ms. Zeisel was born in Budapest, Hungrary in 1906. A podcast gallery talk will be available during the exhibition.

Looks like the best thing going on Tuesday, as far as an art opening in NYC.   It’s amazing that Eva Zeisel will be at the opening, signing a book – maybe I’ll buy one.  Who knows, perhaps I’ll run into some people I used to know at NYIT, including Linda Lauro, who has taught at Pratt for a while.

It’s kinda of interesting because, the more I think about it, the more I’m aware that many of the people I’ve known in my life, including people who are no longer in my life, were approaching some of the same problems and issues I have, mainly the synthesis of different art forms and science.  That seems to be a theme in my life, that people crossed my path who approach the same issues, but in their own way.

I write for Smartmobs.com as does Mike Love, but we’ve never met, or even exchanged emails.  However, I am very impressed with Mike Love’s post on the Genealogy of Influence in Smartmobs.com the other day. 

Using Wikipedia and XML programming, Mike Love has managed to map the Genealogy of important people – I just happened to pick artists because this is an art blog and I’m an artist.    I think there’s the begining of much bigger idea – just imagine if you could search on persons or firm name and come up with a chart of the relationships of people that person knows or that firm is connected to. 

When you hover over an Artist’s name, a short biography of the artist is displayed.  Right now, the idea is basic, but it’s the right direction and much different than what Kartoo is doing (see below).

I see the future of Search as visual (at least in the sense of organizing information) and while Kartoo’s relationship of URL with a keyword (via location in a map) is interesting to look at, it’s really not very useful at the end of the day, at least, not for me.

What Mike Love has done, using Wikipedia, is a lot more useful – you need to be able to put anything into a search and get the kind of map he’s producing for well known people who influenced each other (or the order of it).

Now it’s time to sign off….I hear the last day of Wired NextFest is today (Sunday, October 1st, 2006) and I may want to take my son to it (if he does not put up too much of a fight or my back is in too much pain).  We’ll see – maybe sleep will help a little.

Signing off.