This exhibition is held in honor of Hyde Park Art Center Board Member and Chair emeritus, Deone Jackman. The new live digital artwork Spigot by Jason Salavon experiments with the artistic possibilities of information technology and unconventional source materials. In this large-scale projection on the Hyde Park Art Center’s facade, pulsating fields of color serve as the background for rapidly emerging pieces of text; these images alternate with multicolored, interlocking squares that recede and project in a dynamic rhythm. Feeding live and directly from the internet, Spigot responds in real time to the artist’s top Google searches, translating that raw, linguistic data into abstracted, aesthetic forms. Salavon developed code and software to transform elements from the searches into bars of color. These bars combine to form a sort of rainbow colored vortex, distilling that vast quantity of information into vibrant, rhythmic patterns. The text that appears intermittently throughout the project reveals Salavon’s search terms and dates.
Spigot is a continuation of Jason Salavon’s investigations into the hidden patterns that lie beneath our daily encounters. The artist is known for his Duchamp-like use of “found” information from pop culture and banal lived experience. In the past he has drawn from such disparate sources as Playboy magazine, the Hollywood hit Titanic, and popular late night television shows. Through Salavon’s innovative use of information technology, these source materials are transformed into visually stunning digital images that abstract mundane lived experience into hypnotic patterns. Though Salavon works with a range of material forms–from photographic prints to video installations and real-time software–the common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters. Largely influenced by American popular culture and innovations in information technology, Jason Salavon’s work manipulates digitized material while presenting unique approaches to familiar iconography. The common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters.
