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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
| GALLERIES Taming technology's overload with artful systems
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, 5/2/2003 Although it has an unfortunate title, ''info@blah,'' the show at the
Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, stands out because it
wrestles with a serious question posed by the Information Age: What do we
do with all this knowledge at our fingertips? Taking overload as a
starting point, the curating group iKatun has assembled artists who make
sense of, break open, and critique the plight of the over-informed. They
don't just wallow in the overload: They use it as the material for their
art.
Many of them invent systems to contain their material. In ''Datamining
the Amazon,'' Angie Waller graphs out literary tastes of acquaintances,
mimicking the niche marketing of Amazon.com, only to discover that nobody
perfectly fits into any niche. In ''Working Notes,'' Natalie Loveless
interviewed people who stopped by the gallery, then mapped out their
stories in an intricate grid on the wall, with push pins (or straight
pins, or needles) fastening items connected to each story into the
plaster.
Other artists attempt to subvert systems. Rachel Perry Welty's
''Everything in the Beginning'' takes medical records and paints over
them, a single dot obscuring almost every letter or character,
appropriating a record of struggle into something beautiful. Rachel Beth
Egenhoefer's ''Revealed Messages'' records a table full of chocolates, set
in a grid on digital video, transforming it into binary information that
the viewer can alter by eating a chocolate.
Others appropriate and re-envision systems. The group Stanza's Internet
piece, www.thecentralcity.co.uk, takes information from maps and images of
London and breaks it down to unexpected slivers, then builds it up into
something startling and unrecognizable. Joseph Smolinski's ''Potato
Cells'' is delightfully earthy, making a light show out of a combination
of fiber optic cables and the more archaic method of plugging battery
electrodes into spuds.
Artists and scientists are usually the first to make sense of the
unknown. ''Info@blah'' suggests that despite -- or maybe because of -- all
our knowledge, we're in a sea of unknowing, but there are pioneers out
there trying to map it for us.
Curator Dana Moser has put together a robotics show, ''The Ballad of
Wires and Hands,'' at the New Art Center, which has its opening tonight,
and it's got plenty of metaphorical (and some actual) bells and whistles.
It's fun, but is it more than magic?
Sometimes. A handful of the pieces are hauntingly beautiful, like Dan
Roe's ''Sisyphus Dreams'' series, in which he explores the struggle of the
man destined by the Greek gods to spend his life pushing a stone up a
hill, only to watch it roll down again. Roe turns Sisyphus into an
electronic moth, in one piece batting hopelessly against the inside of a
glass dome. In another, tied by the tail to a rock. Steve Hollinger makes
exquisite, solar-powered models of nature. Touch a pedal, turn on a light,
and ''Jellyfish'' delicately wafts in a vessel filled with water.
Arthur Ganson and Chris Fitch are longtime makers of kinetic
sculptures. Ganson's ''Radio Press'' is a hoot: Gears turning
incrementally during the course of the show tighten a vise on an old
transistor radio, slowly crushing it. Fitch's ''Bubbles'' makes metal
washers into glimmering spheres, riding up and down vibrating belts. Deb
Todd Wheeler's ''La La la-la-la'' invites you to duck your head inside a
mesh dome. The motion sets off flitting lights like fireflies chirping
sounds. It's enchanting, but it would be even more so with a sky full of
lights.
In other pieces, the technology trips up the message -- even when the
message is about technology, like David Webber's motion detector that
merely sets off all sorts of turntables and monitors, or Jane D.
Marsching's projection piece, showing a seashore scene revolving around a
tiny dark room. The image is small and cryptic, and the viewer has to
chase it to begin to make sense of it, and gets dizzy in the process.
''The Ballad of Wires and Hands'' is in the end a fun show, full of
interactive pieces. A child visiting the gallery when I was there named
her favorite piece, which turned out to be the most low-tech work in the
show: a hand-cranked sculpture by Fitch. The artists may have something to
learn from her.
Idea overload ''Invisible Ideas,'' one of the Boston
Cyberarts Festival's public art pieces, deserves kudos for high
aspirations, but once again the equipment gets in the way of the content.
This piece, devised by the Nature and Inquiry Artists Group, puts a small
computer tuned into a GPS satellite into the hands of anyone who wants to
wander from the Copley Society, where you can get the equipment, down the
Commonwealth Mall and into the Public Garden and the Common.
Through that area, at 147 points, ideas flash on the computer screen
and speak into your headphones. Art, physics, metaphysics, and ideas about
community are discussed. Stories are told. Sometimes they connect to your
geography, sometimes they don't. It's like taking a walk with a revered
teacher: rigorous, challenging, occasionally enlightening, often pedantic.
I felt I couldn't enjoy the beautiful spring day, as I was having an
intellectual dialogue with a computer. The intent was to connect me with
my environment; instead, it cut me off from it.
info@blah: Overload
and Organization
The Ballad of Wires and Hands
Invisible Ideas
This story ran on page C16 of the Boston Globe on
5/2/2003. |