Thursday, December 4, 2008

Art in General



Coming to You LIVE presents artworks that reflect the notion of live transmission, one of the dominant technological processes that shapes and defines our relationship with information. Continually updated streams of information permeate both the home and the workplace and are increasingly pervasive elements of contemporary architecture and infrastructure. Drawing from direct news coverage, live feeds of financial data, and reality TV and its myriad DIY offshoots on YouTube, the artworks in the exhibition—like the majority of live transmissions—report on largely unspectacular material with little real-time urgency. The show focuses more on the social, political and psychological effects of a wired world than the advanced equipment that enables it.

Andrea Polli's installation involves a live image feed from the South Pole, while Ian Burns' video of an icy plane with a waving flag in its midst reveals itself to be an illusion concocted from, among other elements, a plastic Wonder Bread box, a bulb, and a fan. Pre-recorded videos by Saskia Holmkvistand Kimberly Miller display subjects molded by the ever-present potential of "going live" and Francis Carlow and Katya Sander take on the anonymous iconicity of newscasters. Ola Pehrson created a live translation of the NASDAQ index into musical notes, resulting in an abstracted composition derived from capital highs and lows. Featuring taped information that appears to be "live," along with rather undramatic real-time footage, several of the pieces remind us that direct visual access can create a sense of profound geographic remoteness rather than the celebrated promise of immediate global connectivity.

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