MTAA + RSG’s new multi-channel video/software installation, Want, is being premiered at the exhibition LIVE at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine next week!

More on Want here and here.

Along with MTAA & RSG, LIVE includes artists Karen Finley, Siebren Versteeg, Natalie Bookchin, Ben Rubin, Aphid Stern and Michael Dale and is curated by David Familian.

Read the official press release (format smorgasbord):
Google doc
Word (.doc)
OpenOffice (.odt)
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Excerpt below:

BRIEF OVERVIEW
What is the meaning of “live” in today’s virtual world? The Beall Center for Art and Technology is pleased to present LIVE, an exhibit which features nine artists who sample and transform data, photographs and video from the Internet and incorporate it into their sculptures and installations. The LIVE exhibit will be open to viewers April 3 – June 7, 2008.

[…]

CURATOR’S STATEMENT
The title of this exhibition poses a question—how do we define and experience what is live when the majority of our daily interactions are increasingly mediated and reconfigured by various technologies? And how does this change our perception of what is considered real or actual versus what is virtual? Līve features nine artists who sample and transform data, photographs and video from the Internet and incorporate it into their sculptures and installations. Either extracting live footage or transmitting data in real time, they cull from diverse sources including Congressional speeches from C-Span, websites with Iraqi war casualties, a critique of consumerism from a peer-to-peer network and on-line video surveillance. As the artists isolate ideas and images from the steady stream of unrelenting data, they produce thought-provoking, aesthetic and “līve” works of art that also challenge our ideas of real and virtual experience.

In 1889 in Time and Free Will, the philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that the “real” and the “unreal” do not exist, there is only the actual and virtual — the actual is that which science describes and quantifies, while the virtual is what we process in our minds. As we take in the input of the actual world through our senses and process a series of physical and quantifiable information, it is transformed into conscious and unconscious responses, as our minds become a repository of virtual experiences.

As communication technologies such as telegraph and telephone were invented, there was suddenly a great physical distance between the sender and the receiver. The innovation of radio and television broadcast media increased this spatial displacement even further, transforming one-to-one personal communication into live events experienced by masses of people. The advent of recording technology increased displacement not just the spatially but also temporally: recordings became like memories fixed in both form and time, just as writing allowed speech to be fixed as text. As Plato noted in his famous account of conversations between Socrates and Phaedrus, throughout history the direct experience and dialogical nature of live speech has always been privileged over recorded text.

Even today it is always emphasized and privileged when any event—a breaking news story, a natural disaster, a sports match or a performance is presented “live.” Since the 1990s with the omnipresence of the Internet and more recently, Web 2.0 technologies such as You Tube, Flicker and social net-working sites, the notion of live experiences has become more spontaneous and democratized. Artists noticed these changes in the mid-1990s in the first generation of web-based artworks.

The artists in Live build upon this early work, but expand that vocabulary, extending their art from the web page into the gallery. Their wide range of approaches, forms and methods explore the space/time displacements of mediated events and how those events are both transmitted and remediated.

Read the entire press release… permanent link to this post