Coded After Lovelace

Click Click Click @ Whitebox Art Center, Sep 2

1 September 2014

To close off its Coded After Lovelace group exhibition, curated by Faith Holland and Nora O’ Murchú, New York’s Whitebox Art Center will be hosting the Click Click Click screening of GIFs and video on  September 2, from 7 to 10 pm.

Presenting work by a slew of contemporary artists, including Lorna Mills, Jennifer Chan, and Claudia Maté, as well as Sabrina Ratté, Raquel Meyers and Hannah Black, the event aims to present “new gestures of digital image making”.

As a survey of practices within the medium spanning “GIFs, augmented performances, green screen keying, collage, appropriation, processing, 3D renders and more”, the event follows the Coded After Lovelace exhibition examining the role of art and new technologies in responding to the contemporary condition.

Inspired by the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, and featuring her creative descendants including Lillian Schwartz, Arleen Schloss, Olia Lialina, Claudia Hart, Carla Gannis, Rosa Menkman and Jillian Mayer, Coded After Lovelace tracks the influence of the past in constructing the present and looking towards the future with Click Click Click.

See the Whitebox Art Center events page for details. **

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Coded After Lovelace (2014) exhibition photos + GIFs

27 August 2014

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”

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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.

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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.

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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.

Coded After Lovelace group exhibition is on at New York’s Whitebox Art Center, running from August 14 and closing with the Click Click Click screening on September 2, 2014.

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