DEVOTION GALLERY @ TEDx Brooklyn

[img]http://www.areyoudevoted.com/storage/events/ted/images/header.jpg[/img]
Devotion Gallery presents: Expansive Visions
TheTEDxBrooklyn Exhibition

November 13, 2010

Venue: TEDxBrooklyn http://www.tedxbrooklyn.com/
Pratt Institute (Brooklyn Campus)
200 Willoughby Avene
Brooklyn, NY 11205

To purchase tickets, please go here > http://2010tedxbrooklyn.eventbrite.com/

ART WORKS BY: SOFTLab, Joshue Ott and Morgan Packard, Mark Skwarek, Sougwen Chung, Phillip Stearns, Aaron Meyers, Ted Hayes, Dan Tesene, Phoenix Perry, Margaret Schedel


This exhibition, which will take place at TedXBrooklyn, showcases artists currently exhibited by Devotion Gallery in a variety of mediums including gaming, architecture, augmented reality, data visualization and neural networking. Each artist is breaking new ground in the field in which they are creating.

Devotion is a Williamsburg gallery focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design. We present cross-disciplinary work that draws from architecture, computation, gaming, biology, fabrication, interface design, open-source communities, cloud computing, sound, and complexity. We are always seeking out artists who use new technologies or introduce new paradigms. We work with the distinct purpose of giving the New York arts community a venue that radically re-envisions how art and technology negotiate relationships within our culture. Together with our aritsts, educators and researchers, we are fostering a community that generates dialogue between art, technology, and scientific research.

In addition to presenting an interdisciplinary curatorial vision, Devotion houses a comprehensive arts education program. Our educational programming emphasizes the integration of technology, community, and creativity: All of our classes are designed with these facets in mind. We are currently developing a program for teen girls to foster creative growth through the use of technology.

TEDxBrooklyn will explore and celebrate the making of a movement. From conception, to mass adoption, through doubt and success, every movement has a life-cycle.

We'll focus on how the passions of transformational individuals can launch a movement, and how emerging technologies and merging communities can help shape and propel those movements.

Speakers will include some of Brooklyn's* most promising innovators, from entrepreneurs to artists, religious leaders to community activists, storytellers to scientists.

What is TEDx?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxBrooklyn, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxBrooklyn event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

About TEDx

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED Conference invites the world's leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes. Their talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The annual TED Conference takes place in Long Beach, California, with simulcast in Palm Springs; TEDGlobal is held each year in Oxford, UK. TED's media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily, and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world; and the TEDFellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.

Josh Ott: Thicket
BIO
New York-based visualist Joshue Ott creates cinematic visual improvisations, performed live and projected in large scale. Working from hand-drawn forms manipulated in real-time with superDraw, a software instrument of his own design, Ott composes evolving images that reside somewhere between minimalism, psychedelia, and Cagean chance, delivered with an inescapably human touch. Supple yet digital, ephemeral but instantly memorable, Ott renders sound into vision, yielding an immersive multi-sensory experience that is at once immediate and synergistic, a unique visual narrative born in the moment.

Performing with musicians from all genres between classical and avant-electronica, Ott's visuals have been featured at Unsound festival NY,Biennial of the Americas, Mutek, Communikey, Plateaux festival (Poland), GAFFTA, Yuri's Night Bay Area, Le Cube (Paris), the Playgrounds Audiovisual Art Festival (Netherlands), and the 2006 Ars Electronica Animation Festival. He has performed with the American Composer's Orchestra at Carnegie Hall; with Son Lux at MASS MoCA; with Gina Gibney Dance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center; and frequently at venues throughout New York City, including Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette, the Knitting Factory, and the Stone. Recently Ott released an iPhone/iPad app called Thicket, which allows users to experience a taste of his live interactive visuals on a portable device.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Thicket is an audiovisual world of texture, movement, line and tone. Thicket is part art piece, part toy, part wind chime, part spiderweb. One reviewer calls it "the closest I've come to actually making love with my phone". If you like snowflakes, chaos, fire, and music without words, there's a good chance you'll love Thicket. Spending time with Thicket, you create dense, mesmerizing sonic and visual patterns within a space of warm, bright, rhythmic sound design and constantly evolving, bending, elegant scrawls. Touch it, let it go, use one, two, three or ten fingers, try a violent scribble, or a gentle caress.

Thicket's creators, Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, are artist/programmers with roots in underground techno, classical music, art, theater and dance, who usually present their work on big screens and big sound systems. Thicket, their first adventure in to the world of mobile app art, is an intimate, highly personalized realization of the artistic styles they have each developed over years of dedicated work in venues throughout the world.

Mark Skwarek: AR Layer
BIO
Mark Skwarek is a new media artist working to bridge the gap between virtual reality and the real world by using augmented realities and multi-user online environments to bring a virtual context into physical space. He explores this intersection in both his private art practice as well as in academic research projects. Mark primarily works with 3-D graphics and video game technology to create new media works of art. Mark's current body of work gives context to society's present condition in the United States by drawing from related social and political issues in real time. These weighted concepts are mixed with public augmented realities to give new meaning to the experience of the physical space. Mark has recently shown in ISEA 09, CyberArts 09, the Sunshine International Art Museum in Beijing and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. Mark is an “Artist in Residence” and adjunct faculty at NYU Polytech University. Mark is also adjunct faculty at the New York City College of Technology’s Architecture Department.

Softlab: Shizuku
BIO
SOFTlab is a design studio based in New York City. The studio was created by Jose Gonzalez and Michael Szivos, shortly after receiving graduate degrees in architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The studio has since been involved in the design and production of projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture, to interactive design, to large-scale digital video installations. As the studio adjusted to a wide range of projects , it began to focus less on the medium and style and more on ideas.

As a studio, SOFTlab, embraces projects that are strange, difficult, blurry, and straddle multiple mediums. The constraints of each project are treated as opportunities that are tested through a collaborative studio environment with the hopes of solving typical problems in new ways, with new tools. Through the studio’s unique blend of backgrounds as designers, artists, architects and educators we are able to approach every project from a fresh perspective to create rich spatial, graphic, interactive and visual experiences. SOFTlab privileges adaptability and infuses every project with the capacity to evolve and grow into something new and unexpected. Rather than thinking of a project as finished, the studio thinks of a project as a chance to cultivate intelligent change. By mixing research, creativity and technology with a strong desire to make working fun, SOFTlab attempts to create new and unique experiences.

SOFTlab has produced a wide range of design projects and collaborated with various artists, designers, publications and institutions including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times, eVolo Magazine, Surface Magazine, Columbia University and Pratt Institute. The studio has also exhibited work in galleries throughout New York City.

DAN TESINE: Lessons of Excess
BIO
Dan Tesene is best known for labor intensive drawings and intricate sculptures that transform mundane patterns and information into conceptually rich images. His drawings and sculptures bring together complex patterns found in nature and relate them to the manufactured world in which we are immersed. Tesene has exhibited in New York City, Florence Italy, Cairo and Alexandria Egypt. While attending Minneapolis College of Art and Design he received a Merit and Vanderlip Scholarship. Upon completion of his BFA he received the Jerome Foundation Fellowship For The Arts (2005).

ARTIST STATEMENT
How much oil is consumed by the population daily? How many buildings would it take to house it all? Comparing daily oil consumption to the scale of midtown Manhattan, Dan Tesene contextualizes the magnitude of our addiction. Every day 84 million barrels are used, which would fill a structure 13 times the size of the empire state building. By dwarfing something we all relate to as being gigantic, the excess of depletion of this resource becomes concrete and comprehensible. This sculptural installation illustrates the perverse reality humans exist within, and the true drain of resources taking place 365 days a year.


Sougwen Chung: Erstwhile
BIO
Sougwen is a Brooklyn-based designer/illustrator currently living in Stockholm, Sweden.

Her latest work attempts to capture a kinetic essence and rhythm across a static surface, contrasting delicately controlled line-work with a freeform approach to mark-making, producing images that are dynamic in their stillness.

Her early forays into generative art with NY-based artist Joshua Davis have been mentioned in Computer Arts Magazine and her illustrations have been featured on sites such as Booooom, Design You Trust, Behance Network, Typography Served, The Strange Attractor, Ffffound, Site Inspire, and numerous other independent sources online.


Aaron Meyers: The Moon is Made of Plop
ARTIST STATEMENT
Aaron Meyers took NASA’s topographical LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) map of the moon, and instead of assigning a pixel to each data point, he assigned a bubbly frame from the animated GIF on the left, created by the amazing sprite master Paul Robertson.

BIO
Aaron Meyers is a designer and programmer using generative strategies in the creation of software and moving image. Since earning his MFA at the USC Interactive Media Division in 2007, Meyers worked in the now-defunct Yahoo Design Innovation Team, taught classes at UCLA Design|Media Arts and continues to work on a variety of interactive projects for diverse clients that have included Digg, Radiohead, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Phoenix Perry: Step Into the Light
BIO
Phoenix Perry has been working for a decade+ in art and technology. From working in San Francisco as a digital arts curator and educator, creating the award winning DVD project Reline, and opening Devotion Gallery, I have extensive experience in new media, technology, and user interfaces. My work has screened worldwide, at venues such as Lincoln Center, SFMoma, The Guggenheim, Transmediale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, LAMCA, European Media Arts Festive, GenArt, Seoul Film Festival, and many others. I explore gaming, environment, complexity, and technology. I participated in the HarvestWorks 2006 Residency Program.

ARTIST STATEMENT
This body of work started in 2004 when I began drawing by hand again. Moving from an all digital practice to a pen reinforced in me the astounding complexity and beauty of nature. After creating hundreds of sketches, I integrated both practices together to create these pieces. The flexibility of digital creation let me add additional levels of complexity to the original pieces. At its core, this newer work experiments with building up complexity through repetition, algorithms and pattern. Fusing interests in nature, complexity, and emergence together, these drawings weave together an abstract experimental ecologies.


Margaret Anne Schedel: 20 Love Songs and a Song of Despair (excerpts)
BIO
Margaret Anne Schedel is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media. Her works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. While working towards a DMA in music composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, her interactive multimedia opera, A King Listens, premiered at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and was profiled by apple.com. holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle. She sits on the boards of 60x60 Dance, the BEAM Foundation, the Electronic Music Foundation Institute, the International Computer Music Association, the New West Electronic Art and Music Organization, and Organised Sound. She contributed a chapter to the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music and her article on generative multimedia was recently published in Contemporary Music Review. Her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. In 2009 she won the first Ruth Anderson Prize for her interactive installation Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. Her research focuses on gesture and music, and the sustainability of technology in art. She is a co-owner of Devotion Gallery in Williamsburg Brooklyn. As an Assistant Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is a core faculty member of cDACT, the consortium for digital art, culture and technology. In 2010 she co-chaired the International Computer Music Conference.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
This multi-media collaborative installation/video is inspired by Pablo Neruda's poetic cycle of the same name. Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair enables the audience to sense the construct of the perception and manipulation of time, embodying Neruda's phrase "love is so short, forgetting is so long." In the installation, twenty-one sculptures containing sound and video are activated only when manipulated, allowing the audience to choose a multi-threaded path through a physical, yet virtual experience. Neruda’s poems are rich not only with static visual ideas but also with shifting imagery, movement and sonic descriptions. These ideas are intertwined with sculpture, video, and audio, juxtaposing disparate elements to create an opulent, layered and textured environment.

Phillip Stearns: DCP Series
BIO
Phillip Stearns is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist and electronics art educator. His work lies at the intersection of art, philosophy, and science, drawing upon a variety of disciplines including installation, audio-video work, circuit sculpture, writing, performance art and musical composition. His work deals primarily with the topic technology, at times approaching electronic technologies as complex artificial living systems, organisms existing within interconnected economies and ecosystems. The core of his creative process lies in creating generative systems using electronics, crowds, or plants to explore the expressiveness within the act of allowing a system to come to its own conclusions. What are the implications of applying contemporary technological thinking to more primitive techniques and technologies as new starting points for re-conceptualizing the present and re-imagining the future?

STATEMENT
The DCP Series of Digital Images are direct visualizations of data generated by a digital camera as it takes a picture. Electronic processes associated with the normal operations of the camera, which are usually taken for granted, are revealed through an act of intervention. The camera is turned inside-out through complexes of short-circuits, selected by the artist, transforming the camera from a picture taking device to a capturing device that renders raw data (electronic signals) as images. In essence, these images are snap-shots of electronic signals dancing through the camera's circuits, manually rerouted, written directly to the on-board memory device. Rather than seeing images of the world through a lens, we catch a glimpse of what the camera sees when it is forced to peer inside its own mind.