New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC
[ Opening Reception ] Fri. October 19, 2001 6-8 PM
Cin-o-matic explores the evolution of the cinematic experience and the impact of new technologies on time-based works. The exhibition includes the artist collaborative project Adrift and works by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig, Yucef Merhi, Joseph Nechvatal, and John Cabral. Each of the projects presented utilizes the Internet as a tool for reconfiguring media-into network performance, net art, software-propelled visualizations, or sculptural objects-and each creates a new cinematic experience. Although they embrace an impressive range of approaches and visual languages, the works in Cin-o-matic share a central concern with how we explore and perceive time, space, and movement through today's advanced technologies.
Adrift, a collaboration by Helen Thorington, Marek Walczak, and Jesse Gilbert with Martin Wattenberg and Hal Eager, is an evolving multi- location Internet performance project that combines projections, narrative text, and richly textured sound streaming in real-time, linking imaginary and actual geographies. Presented for the first time on a large, semicircular screen which recalls the Cineorama, a panoramic projection space used during the World's Fair in France in 1900 to simulate a sense of drifting through an environment, Adrift creates an immersive journey through both real and virtual imagery of a harbor, metaphorically linking Internet surfing and physical movement.
Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig present Appearance Machine, a constructed sculptural ecosystem that produces a cinematic aural/visual space by continuously transforming data input from locally generated refuse via a robotic system and distributing it, using live feed as media, to a global community. Images from the machine, located in Brooklyn, are analyzed for movement by the computer, and an accompanying soundtrack is generated. This sound subsequently guides the machine's mechanisms, creating additional motion and setting in place a continuous system.
When viewed as installations, Adrift and Appearance Machine both imply a reconfiguration of the object into a cinematic experience. These works function as mechanisms in which particular elements are interchangeable so that the structure, context, and content can be translated into a variety of mediums for display.
Using the familiar visual imagery of early video games, Yucef Merhii has created net@ari, a film that breaks down the language of cinema through basic programming and investigates the psychological relationship between human being and machine. Joseph Nechvatal's Computer Virus 2.0 is a synthetic system that behaves like a living organism by gradually eating away at the available visual imagery, commenting upon the fetishization of visual images through technological reproduction. In contrast to the magnification of experience and encapsulation of time found in most cinematic experience, Ground Zero is a real-time 24-hour algorithmic animation that depicts a day in the life of a fictional cartoon character as he tends to mundane tasks.
Cin-o-matic magnifies the artistic process and the artists' use of the "digital studio." Each artist interprets the language of new media to create their own style resulting in original cinematic experiences.
