Saturday, 2nd of June, after a nice cup of coffee in City Hall Park, we visited the exhibition Audio Visual at LMCC’s Swing Space at 38 Park Row. In a small building a collection of seven installations where brought together to show the work of “a new generation of digital artists”, in “order of appearance”:
(cursive parts are quotes from the NYEAF flyer)
Phoenix Perry – Honey
“An interactive game exploring issues of survival and the environment. This powerful game demonstrates even the smallest creatures’ vital importance to their ecosystem as they struggle to survive in a unique, fantasy-world.”
The first installation sounded promising. In the first (and only?) level the user clicks on bees and flowers to make the bees collect the nectar from the flowers. After a few clicks the games stops and the user is guided to a website to play more of the game. I didn’t understand the point of this small tease, especially because the game can’t be played on the recommended website
Olen Hsu – Drift (II) (2007)
“A sculpture and sound installation that charts the prehistory of the digital network. Olen Hsu uses porcelain, paper and algorithmically composed sound, converging new media, tactile forms and acoustic instruments.”
The sculpture made of porcelain and paper emits an algorithmic composition created with numerical oceanographic data of the past two hundred years. The seven gramophone horns made you expect that each horn would emit a different sound, but that wasn’t the case.
On the wall next to the sculpture hang the oceanographic data which Olen Hsu used for his composition. Parts of his (orchestral)composition could also be read.
Lovid & Douglas Repetto – cross current resonance transducer
“A sculptural-graphic collaboration that addresses the processes of interpretation and evaluation inherent in human attempts to understand natural phenomena.”
Headphones and a TV with “the-making-of-cross-current-resonance-transducer”-video playing on it. The sculpture was standing in front of the TV. Is this an installation?
I didn’t have the patience to watch the more than 15-minutes during documentary.
Terry Nauheim – rotating
“Rotating (in Four Movements) is an installation built from recorded and processed sound fragments of hand-cast record negatives and their corresponding recorded drawings.”
A video screen with a projection split up in four parts. Every part has his own and different rotating forms of circles rotating on a turntable. This video was accompanied with crackly sounds (like what you hear when a record is scratched and the needle hangs in the groove) only record negatives were used for this. A nice detail, I must say.
To see a movie excerpt of and sound clips of this installation
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky – el espectàculo
Three TV’s standing next to each other showing a synchronized video. The video that was shown was a typical example of “cut-and-paste”: celebrities, or mass media characters, were cut out of there “natural habitat”. Then the artist made little loops of the movements of the celebrities, duplicated them and placed them in lines to suggest some sort of choreographed dance. The background regularly changed colour (very basic colours were used) and eventually the background changed into “news breaks”, like the tsunami or other disasters.
Hisao Ihara – the collapsing wall
About five TFT-screens placed above each other on a wall. What they showed was a “collapsing wall”. From the top small “bricks” made of video-material fell down to the bottom where you could watch the movie that was used for making the “bricks”.
Rashaad Newsome’s – The Conductor
Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is used as the basic soundtrack for the 2.31 min. digital video made up of footage from various popular hip-hop videos. The footage is digitally enhanced end re-edited to track the motion of the hands of the hip-hop artists. The soundtrack is accompanied with sounds extracted from the hiphop videos.
