PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND THEIR WORKS:
Gregory P. Garvey, Quebec, Canada
Zoe Beloff's CD-ROM, called Beyond, represents a haunting, complex exploration of the "dream life" of technology, the period from 1850 to 1940. The project combines 80 digital movie clips with an interface comprised of 20 Quicktime Virtual Reality panoramas. Beyond was exhibited at the 1997 Whitney Museum Biennial in New York.
Jan Blair and Nancy Macko will exhibit Glimpsing Romania, a collaborative project consisting of a website and digital prints. The artwork, combining images and text, functions as a traveler's diary. The text excerpts provide insights into the artists’ experience of everyday life in Romania in conjunction with their search for the origin of matriarchal culture.
Dwayne Carter's CD-ROM, The Dark Bible, re-presents the narrative from the four Gospels in a contemporary, secular context; his innovative animation represents a kind of figurative painting in motion.
Gregory P. Garvey's humorous web project, entitled Genderbender, is loosely based on the Bem Sex Role Inventory. This interactive website includes a self-administered questionnaire containing scales to measure masculinity and femininity.
David Najjab appropriates nineteenth-century imagery of the Near East, as created by Western photographers, to comment on conventions of representation. He presents a virtual reality panorama as sequential digital prints. Najjab constructs a nineteenth-century toy, a three-dimensional viewing device similar to a zoetrope, to produce the illusion of motion.
Andrew Ortiz uses poetic digital montages to combine fragments from his life, symbols of his Mexican heritage and icons from his American middle-class background. His work investigates issues relating to ethnic and cultural heritage.
Janet Shriver mixes a multitude of references to the heart in her series, The Heart's Code. In her digital photographs she merges familiar icons with chest x-rays, symbols of the heart with its anatomical form. Her work prompts an acknowledgement of one’s inability to fully represent one’s inner self.
Piotr Szyhalski's web project, Ding an Sich: The Canon Series, is comprised of more than ten animations that represent a response to Ding an Sich, or The Thing Itself, borrowing from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Szyhalski uses the model of a musical score for his online animation, a work performed by the viewer. His website The Spleen has been featured in The New York Times, Wired Magazine and Rolling Stone.
Victoria Vesna will present her online collaborative web project entitled Dallas Bodies. Vesna, the guest speaker for the exhibition, is a network artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Art Studio/Department of Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara. She also serves as Director of the Experiments in Art and Technology Lab at UCSB. Among her works are interactive installations of Bodies INCorporated at the Venice Biennale in Italy and at the San Francisco Art Institute in California.. Her site-specific installations include Dublin Bodies, created for the Art House in Dublin, Ireland. Victoria Vesna has created multi-user environments with VRML (virtual reality markup language). The artist’s collaboration with programmers has resulted in the construction of the complex website Bodies INCorporated.
Stephen Willis fabricates crime scene images using photographic conventions associated with 1930s photojournalists such as Weegee. Excerpts from these images are recombined digitally with headlines, connecting the incidence of violence and crime in society with the violent imagery staged for film and television.