Presumably named after artist and mathematician Ada Lovelace -or 19th century computer programmer and maker of the first algorithm – the Coded After Lovelace exhibition tracks the evolution of ‘digital art’ before it became a buzzword. Curators Faith Holland and Nora O’ Murchú open the press release with a quote from a book, itself titled after said slang – Digital Art (2003) – where Christian Paul announces:
“Artists have always been among the first to reflect on the culture and technology of their time, and decades before the digital revolution had been officially proclaimed, they were experimenting with the digital medium”
Herewith are those experimenters from this inter-generational survey of artists exploring technology as creative medium, from pioneer net- artist and archaelogist Olia Lialina, who’s been “keeping the GIF running” since reviving Chuck Poynter’s ‘Dancing Girl‘ in 1999, to Carla Gannis‘ challenge to military-industrial algorithms and surveillance in the digital assemblages of Non-Facial Recognition.
Downtown New York new media artist Arleen Schloss explores language and the alphabet in the tradition of literary daughter Lovelace (her dad happened to be poet Lord Byron) using laser projections, while shifting representations of identity and virtuality are central to Claudia Hart‘s poetic subversion of commercial 3D graphics.
Meanwhile, noise, video compression and feedback corrupts the file formats of Rosa Menkman‘s cultural, political and historical deconstructions through glitch, while Jillian Mayer brings comfort in the face of a contemporary digital dystopia that early computer-mediated artist Lillian Schwartz, and Lovelace herself, might only have imagined. **
Exhibition photos, top-right.
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