“The Digital Senses: When Digital Data Turns into Art” exposition at the Center for Contemporary Art
In line with the latest digital art fad, the Digital Senses: When Digital Data Turns Into Art exhibition, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard in Ukraine, opened at Kyiv’s Centre for Contemporary Art. Eight works by artists from Austria, France, England, Serbia, Japan and the US take a variety of approaches to display digital art.
In interactive installation “Phantasm” by young Japanese artist Takahiro Matsuo, participants are lit up in a small dreamlike world in space. Imagine you’re in a dark room, holding a pleasantly warm glowing sphere in your hands and you’re surrounded by a net full of shimmering, fluttering butterflies that react to your movements. Subdued piano music enhances this magical performance—a work composed of light and one of nature’s most delightful forms.
The “Messa di Voce” exhibits by the American artists’ group Tmema and “Life Spacies II” by Christa Sommerer (Austria) and Laurent Mignonneau (France) are also require viewer interaction. “Messa di Voce” involves the interplay of language, sounds and graphics. It’s a virtuoso narrative account that interlinks acoustic and visual elements. With it, you can use your words and songs to draw and paint your own pictures. “Life Spacies II” is an interactive artificial life environment where users can create artificial creatures by typing text messages. The text characters function as genetic code for the creature’s design. Each different text-string will create a different creature. Depending on their construction creatures can move fast or slow. They will move around and try to eat text characters. Once a creature has eaten enough characters it can look for a partner creature and mate. Their digital off-spring will look similar to their parents as their genetic code is a product of artificial evolution.
“Tissue” by American artist Casey Reas and “MU herbarium” by French artist Catherine Nyeki are so-called Code Art projects simply enwrap the user in their web. Whereas in Catherine Nyeki’s work, these are figurative creatures resembling beings in nature, Casey Reas spins abstract strands and webs around our powers of imagination and thereby evoking new impressions and emotions. These works toy with us and lead us to believe that we’re the creators of new images.
“Spacequatica” by the British artists group The Sancho Plan is careful combination of animation, sound, music and technology. The Sancho Plan creates fantastical worlds in which animated musical characters are triggered by a variety of electronic drum pads. Their exhibit invites you to explore an audiovisual aquarium populated by a varied cast of musical sea creatures. Visually and sonically, the user plays along a descending journey – from the surface, where schools of small exotic creatures can be seen like phasing xylophones, through the deeper waters populated by dangerous robotic sharks, and on to the pitch black depths, where all that can be seen and heard are rare self-illuminating species occasionally blinking out in the darkness.
Visitors of living digital cosmos “s.h.e.” – work of Serbian artist Natasha Teofilovic, are only able to watch as virtual creatures seem to unite with the real exhibit installation space. The two spaces overlap – the virtual with the real. Conceptually, the work is based on an analysis of the virtual space and the virtual actor.
American artist Aaron Koblin didn’t go with superficial stimulus in his work “The Sheep Market.” Koblin designed a homepage featuring sheep made by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “Draw a sheep facing left for the payment of USD 0,02” was the request of the artist and the resulting 10.000 sheep drawings are all exhibited at The Sheep Market website and are forming one big layer/picture of miniaturized sheep drawings.
Center for Contemporary Art (2 Skovorody, 425-7778). Through May 11
