ATC @ UCB: Brixey and Rinehart, Mon 7:30pm

ATC@UCB:

Navigating the Maze: Collaboration and the Chimera Obscura

Shawn Brixey (telematically, from Seattle)
Associate Director DXARTS/University of washington

Richard Rinehart
Director of Digital Media/Berkeley Art Museum & Instructor/Art Practice

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 15 September, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.

(Richard Rinehart will lead the presentation and Prof. Brixey will
participate remotely from Seattle as advised by a doctor).

Commissioned for the traveling exhibition, "Gene(sis), Contemporary
Art Explores Human Genomics", "Chimera Obscura" is a net
based-telerobotic work inspired by the historical anxieties, eungenic
fantasies, and emerging realities evolving from the frontier of
contemporary genetics research. The collaborative project between
Shawn Brixey and Richard Reinhart is a meta-level discourse on the
nature of human discovery and evolution as exemplified by the Human
Genome Project. Crossing the boundary between gallery installation and
Internet art, the work is constructed around a telerobotic agent that
Internet visitors use to navigate, and decode a highly complex maze
designed from a human thumbprint. The project employs a mutative game
style structure allowing visitors to leave a virtual trail of media
memes behind them for others to read, duplicate, or delete in the
search for a unique sequence that will decode the maze. The ghost of
the minotaur roams the maze in the form of random mutative forces (a
mathematical algorithm), frustrating attempts at easy, linear
resolution. Visitors break through by assuming a newer hybrid form -
that of telematic cyborgs, simultaneously operating in real space and
virtual space, while existing physically in a third removed
place. Elastic physicality and collaborative agency integrates
technology with basic human functions to extend our discourse about
what is organic and evolutionary. Chimera Obscura is on view at the
Berkeley Art Museum through Dec. 7, and online at
http://chimera.berkeley.edu

Brixey and Rinehart will highlight the performative aspects of
creating and presenting interactive, networked art work. Digital media
art provides increased opportunities and demands for collaborative
practice. The Chimera Obscura asks visitors to collaborate (or
compete) by tracing their own and each others' paths in a complex
virtual maze. In this way, the strategy of the work is reflective of
the conditions of practice that created it. This work, like many
collaborative works, is not only a conscious integration of the
collaborator's ideas, but is also an un-self-conscious crossroad of
individual paths that stretch back far and long. This joint
presentation will trace the paths of each artist leading up to and
intersecting at the Chimera Obscura;