gradually melt the sky

a curatorial project by Mark Skwarek + Will Pappenheimer
 
“augmented reality” as overlay, intervention and challenge to the material world


The title of this
exhibition takes its cue from the 1964 artwork-poem “Tunafish Sandwich” by Yoko
Ono. The text imagines a performance event which is at once cosmic and mundane,
an action painting and a protest. The artworks in this exhibition employ a
recent developing technology dubbed “augmented reality” to overlay, intervene
and challenge the physical world in much the same conjectural spirit as
preceding Fluxus and Conceptual works.
As the influence of the
virtual expands, integrates and maps itself across the material, strange
objects, banal byproducts, ghost imagery and radical events appear in our homes
and spatially across the landscape. Closed social systems lodged in physical
hierarchies are layered, then pried open by popup media available to armies of
networked creatives. AR, as this technology is abbreviated, invites artists and
viewers to consider coexistent spacial realities in which anything is possible
anywhere. Subliminal, aesthetic and political suggestions play themselves out
as techno-disturbances in a substratasphere of online and offline experience.
The cell phone or the CRT, are immaterial witness to these ephemeral
dimensional objects and relational post-sculptural events. The fact that this
current technology is primitive, amplifies its potency, with the extra
possibility of actualization tacked on to the conceptual gesture.
Will Pappenheimer, Jan 14,
2011
Artists participating:
eteam, Jeremy Bailey, Kristin
Lucas, Sander Veenhof, Tamiko Thiel, LoVid, Christopher Manzione, Geoffrey Alan
Rhodes, Lily Honglei, Will Pappenheimer, Virta-Flaneurazine, 4 Gentleman, John
Cleater, John Craig Freeman, Mark Skwarek, Phoenix Perry, Patrick Lichty, Alan
Sondheim, Damon Baker, Arthur Peters
Opening night live performances
by Jeremy Bailey and Mark Skwarek at approximately 8pm.

Weekly excursion
performance tours to augmented reality sites in Chelsea, Newtown Creek,
Greenwich Village and Union Square. 
Info, times and itineraries to be published on the two websites below:
http://www.areyoudevoted.com/