As we approach the new millennium, how do we define art? Do viewers remain in the world of art objects or move to a virtual space where a work of art can be extinguished by a thunderbolt of lightening? Do artists relinquish authorship in order to engage viewers in a new art form that embraces collaboration, communication, and the computer's systems and processes?

These kinds of questions will be posed in an art exhibition opening at UT-Dallas on April 3, entitled Digital Code/Cultural Patterns: Digital Photography, CD-ROM, and WebArt at the End of the Millennium. The exhibition, featuring the work of eleven artists from Texas, California, New York, Minneapolis, and Montreal, Canada, explores the potential of new technology in the arts. The exhibition's Saturday, April 3 opening begins at 6 p.m. in the Conference Center with a lecture by network artist Victoria Vesna. Vesna's presentation, entitled "From Bodies INCorporated to a Community of People with No Time," will feature her design of multi-user VRML websites. A reception in the Visual Arts Gallery at 7 p.m. will follow her talk, and Vesna will also be present in the Gallery from 12:30 - 2:30 p.m. on the same day.

The art exhibition features digitally-based projects by eleven artists: Zoe Beloff, Jan Blair, Dwayne Carter, Gregory P. Garvey, Nancy Macko, David Najjab, Andrew Ortiz, Janet Schriver, Piotr Szyhalski, Victoria Vesna and Stephen Willis. Details about the work of each artist are provided below. The artwork on display conveys the artists’ responses to the social fabric of daily life--political issues, historical events, and cultural experiences–and demonstrates their adoption of technology as a means of personal expression. Employing narrative, autobiography, and digital montage, these artists weave disparate fragments culled from the everyday into a complex whole.

The curator for the exhibit is Marilyn Waligore, Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Further information about the exhibition may be obtained by accessing the website at http://www.utdallas.edu/~waligore/digital/code.html.

LINK TO CAMPUS MAP

sponsored by

THE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

BOX 830688 MS JO31 RICHARDSON, TEXAS 75083-0688 (972) 883-2982

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 origins of a 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.

As we approach the new millennium, how do we define art? Do viewers remain in the world of art objects or move to a virtual space where a work of art can be extinguished by a thunderbolt of lightening? Do artists relinquish authorship in order to engage viewers in a new art form that embraces collaboration, communication, and the computer's systems and processes?

These kinds of questions will be posed in an art exhibition opening at UT-Dallas on April 3, entitled Digital Code/Cultural Patterns: Digital Photography, CD-ROM, and WebArt at the End of the Millennium. The exhibition, featuring the work of eleven artists from Texas, California, New York, Minneapolis, and Montreal, Canada, explores the potential of new technology in the arts. The exhibition's Saturday, April 3 opening begins at 6 p.m. in the Conference Center with a lecture by network artist Victoria Vesna. Vesna's presentation, entitled "From Bodies INCorporated to a Community of People with No Time," will feature her design of multi-user VRML websites. A reception in the Visual Arts Gallery at 7 p.m. will follow her talk, and Vesna will also be present in the Gallery from 12:30 - 2:30 p.m. on the same day.

Victoria Vesna, a network artist, 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. Vesna's site facilitates the creation of images, illusory three-dimensional virtual bodies, and subsequent on-line interaction. The on-line participant enters a password, and then designs, edits, renders, and downloads the virtual body image. A portion of the website permits on-line chat among members of this virtual community while another link provides an index to a catalog of rendered bodies, or new electronic identities.

Vesna is an 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.

Vesna's recent publications include ":Buckminster Fuller: Illusive Mutant Artist" in Artbyte, and "Another Day in Paradise and Virtual Concrete: Preserved Palms, Concrete and Telepresence" in Leonardo. She has also directed software titles such as "Life in the Universe with Stephen Hawking."