Screenology: UIC New Media Arts Exhibition

Hyde Park Art Center > Exhibitions > Screenology: UIC New Media Arts Exhibition

The Art Center collaborates with the New Media Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago to offer graduate students the chance to create new public digital work to be presented on the only large-scale digital projection facade in the country dedicated to contemporary art.

The title Screenology references the current trend in research into digital media screens and public art and is also the subject of the seminar led by Daniel Sauter in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s Cyber-Commons facility at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Working with Sauter, the Art Center presents a group show of new work by the UIC graduate student artists who utilize the affordances of the Art Center’s unique media facade in different ways. Each of the seven artists’ work will be shown for a week.

  • May 23, 2011 – June 22, 2011
  • Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery
Brittany Ransom, Host, 2011, 5 channel video with 1 live feed, acrylic, , mung beans, bean beetles, and digital microscope, 5 minutes

Featured Artists

Jon Chambers, Jesus Duran, Chaz Evans, Tiffany Funk, Joe Pankowski, JD Pirtle, and Brittany Ransom.

Host
Brittany Ransom
March 23 – March 31

Brittany Ranson’s artwork invites the viewer to experience a visual and auditory realm controlled by other species with the aim of encouraging a conversation that explores the relationship between our progressive society and our understanding of the natural world. By creating interactive art that relies on the direct contact between animal, insect, and technology, she hopes to bring to light and intensify our sensitivity to the lives of other species.

Artificial Horizons
John Chambers
April 1 – April 7

Artificial Horizons is a five-channel video installation showing imagery of the Lake Michigan with focus on both the natural and the artificial features of the shoreline. The composition and editing of the video was created to map and relate to the architectural lines of the gallery facade. The aim of the projection is to create an experience in which the natural horizons that exist around the Hyde Park Art Center are changed and abstracted. The video subtly highlights ecological concerns.

Drawings on a Telephone Wire
Joe Pankowski
April 8 – April 14

Joe Pankowski’s art practice consists of creating humorous animations, which starts as pen and ink linear drawings. The installations and video he utilizes them in, draw the viewer in to examine a narrated world formed with a touch of the surreal. Drawings on a Telephone Wire is a line drawing animation of pigeons landing and leaving a telephone wire that strings across the length of the Hyde Park Art Center’s windowed facade. The subject matter is in contrast to the modern eye-catching graphics commonly expected of such public screens displays. It is a contemplative piece which talks about time, space, dreaming and everyday life.

Sudden Loss
JD Pirtle
May 26 – June 1

Sudden Loss explores the themes of loneliness and futility through the images of the natural phenomenon of the Moon’s phases and its landscape. The piece presents the viewers with hyper-real representations of the Moon including a combination of live action footage and computer generated models and imagery appropriated from NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The work begins with a time lapsed progression of clouds at sunset, following are images of a rapid rise of the Moon as it quickly cycles through many weeks worth of phases. For the artist these images are meditative and evocative and he is interested in conjuring up a unique reaction from each viewer.

Oekologie
Tiffany Funk
June 2 – June 8

Oekologie is an investigation into the concept of ecology-the study of organisms combined with the larger environment in which they live. Her visualization features organisms that grow and colonize the facade. Visitors are invited to speak to these organisms via a microphone connected to the piece, causing the organisms to “listen” and subsequently “answer” by echoing the voices of visitors they cross and collide with one another. In this way, the project explores the public institution as a refuge within a larger ecosystem, sheltering interaction and communication amongst like-minded communities. June 9 – 15: Visual Ramblings by Jesus Duran Visual Ramblings addresses and subverts the idea that the architecture of an art institution is what physically separates art from its surrounding. The project treats HPAC’s facade as a boundary similar to human skin, which is both protective and porous, serving as a guarding barrier but also as an exchange layer. Conceptually the facade of the gallery becomes a tissue of exchange on which conversation between the inside and outside are played out. As such it allows the spaces in which art is confined to expand.

Behold, the Okioborg!
Chaz Evans
June 16 – June 22

The Oikoborg! is a software-based performance work which looks at the architecture of the art center and tries to re-imagine the building as a persona. The artist takes inspiration from Vera Buhlman’s concept of the oikoborg (an architectural media-being who functions as a companion species to humans) and brings it to a comically literal level by making the catwalk gallery the face of the HPAC-as-oikoborg and the rest of the structure its body. This piece attempts to analyze the problems that might occur in the life of media-being; Its sedentary existence and the difficulty of meeting other media-beings.

About Daniel Sauter

Daniel Sauter is a digital media artist and Assistant Professor, Program Coordinator for New Media Arts at UIC. His artwork has been previously exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center, including Emergence Project, created with Mark Hereld and exhibited on the Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery in 2008.

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