Pockets Full of Memories
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
May 7 to August 1, 2004
Pockets Full of Memories (PFOM) will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki from May 7 to August 1, 2004. Curated by Perttu Rastas for Kiasma, PFOM was inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in the summer of 2001 and has been exhibited at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, 2003, Ars Electronica Festival, 2003, and the “Aura” exhibition, Budapest, 2003.
The installation invites audience participation by requesting the public to digitize and describe an object in their possession into a database which is visually projected in the gallery space and also featured on the internet. The collection of objects is continuously being organized by a vector quantization, self-organizing map algorithm that positions objects of similar descriptions near each other based on their semantic properties. The goal of the project is to visually map out the range of descriptions by which the public at each venue considers the objects they have at hand. The Kohonen algorithm used in this project has been described as an artificial neural-net based algorithm as it exhibits emergent behavior in its unsupervised learning processing, where local actions result in a global order over time.
The collection of contributions can be viewed online at http://www.pocketsfullofmemories.com where comments and messages can be added to any of the objects.
Additional information can be accessed at http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/pfom2/pfom2.html and a detailed description of the project at http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/publications/publ_art/textpfom.html
Pockets Full of Memories Seminar
Museum of Contemporary Kiasma
In conjunction with the exhibition, a seminar was held on May 7, 2004 to discuss research perspectives related to Pockets Full of Memories. Participants included Perttu Rastas, Kiasma media curator; Philip Dean, Dean if the MediaLab Graduate program, University of Helsinki, who addressed perspectives on art and research; Professor George Legrady, University of California, Santa Barbara gave an overview of the installation; Finnish Academy of Science Professor Teuvo Kohonen discussed self-organizing maps; Professor Mauri Kaipainen, Medialab presented related projects from Medialab; Professor Timo Honkela, Helsinki University of Technology discussed self-organizing maps in natural language understanding.
Link:
http://www.pocketsfullofmemories.com
George Legrady is an artist in the field of interactive media arts. He received his MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute, and is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980’s to integrate computer processes into their artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning projects in the early 1990’s that include the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” (1993), “Slippery Traces” (1995), “Sensing Speaking Space” (2002), and the internationally traveling “Pockets Full of Memories” (2001-2008). Legrady’s early artistic work focused on a conceptual and semiotic analysis of the photographic image. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990’s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating new forms of aesthetic representations and socio-cultural narrative experiences. His commission for the Seattle Public Library is one of the few digital artworks to collect and parse data continuously until 2014.
Projects & Exhibitions
Recent interactive installation exhibitions include the “Blink” installation at Foundation Ahlers, Hanover, Germany (2009); the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2007); Pari Nadimi gallery, Toronto (2006); ISEA 06, San Jose (2006); 3rd Beijing New Media Festival (2006); BlackBox Invitational at the International ARCO Art Fair, Madrid (2006); Telic Gallery, Los Angeles (2006); the 8th realization of the “Pockets Full of Memories” data visualization installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2007), previously presented at Frankfurt Museum of Communication (2006), Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester, UK (2005), the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2004), Aura by c3 Media Center, Budapest, (2003); Ars Electronica Festival, Austria (2003); Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 Festival, Rotterdam (2003); the Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, Paris (2001). Other exhibitions consist of a solo exhibition of algorithmically generated still and real-time animated images at the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma (2004-2005); ISEA Conference in Nagoya, Japan, [Sensing Speaking Space] (2003), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (2002); “Future Cinema” exhibition, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2002); [Transitional Spaces] the Rotunde at the Siemens World Headquarters in Munich, [Transitional Spaces], (1999-2000); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, [Tracing], (1998); the Kunst und AustellungHalle der Bundes Republik in Bonn, [Tracing], (1997-1998); the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, (1997-1998); the Palais des beaux-arts, Brussels, [An Anecdoted archive from the cold War], (1997); [Slippery Traces] in the Siemens curated "Deep Storage" exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, (1997); the Kunstforum, Berlin, (1997); the kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, Spring (1998); Projects Studios One, New York, (1998), and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, (1998).
George Legrady is represented by Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles www.edwardcella.com and Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto, www.parinadimigallery.ca
ed halter