Towards a Recombinant Reality - an Online Exhibition By The Alternative Museum

The Alternative Museum is pleased to announce the launch of "Towards a Recombinant Reality": an online exhibition opening on October, 4th, 2002, featuring works by Shu Lea Cheang, Sawad Brooks+Beth Stryker, Olia Lialina, LeCielEstBleu, Eryk Salvaggio, Wolfgang Staelher, and Zhang Ga.

Guest curator, Zhang Ga

This exhibition is made possible by
The National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal Agency
The Center for New Design at Parsons School of Design, a division of New School University
The Friends of the Alternative Museum.

The exhibition can be accessed on line on October the 4th, 2002
at http://alternativemuseum.org

Opening reception:

October the 4th, 2002, 6pm-8pm
Center for New Design Gallery
55 West 13th St.Fl.9th
New York, NY10011
(The gallery installation will remain on view for two weeks)
Contact: Zhang Ga, [email protected]; Geno Rodriguez 212 966 4444
[email protected]



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Towards a Recombinant Reality

That reality is ambiguous and a byproduct of retinal overload suggests an estrangement which artists strive to reconcile.

A recombinant reality is reality processed, meditated, elucidated and transcended, one which is beyond the real yet possesses substance. It is an ontological one that beckons the anonymous, an aesthetic one whose resonance is the utterance of discord, and a logical one therein syllogists find no dwelling.

It is truer than that which is real.

It seeks to reveal, to disclose, to clarify what the real hides from us and bewilders us with. It tells a story of sorrow, narrates a tale of mischief, unfolds a drama of passion and dictates a passage of wisdom. It attempts to explain humanity.

The extension of reality with a binary pulse, the digital reality, has ushered in a new fascination with packets, protocols, and bitmapping of invisible sphere, the new constituents of the reality. The technological sublime overwhelms and consumes, inspires and subdues. It is a dazzlingly blinding force run amok.

Yet, it is a reality that longs for reconciliation, to fill with its hollowness the flesh of life, for the virtual cannot sustain itself without the real, and the real can only be made sense of when recombinant.

Let us therefore sojourn into the nether and yonder land of that recombinant reality. Let us not be a captive of the binary, but let humanity prevail.

Working with network technologies, artists in this exhibition seek to come to terms with that reality. They manifest diverse visual and perceptual undertakings, from powerful vision of the terrible, as seen in Eryk Salvaggio's September 11, to LeCielEstBleu's normality gone absurd, from Shu Lea Cheang's meandering across the tangible and the imagined where home(less) is homepage(less), from Sawad Brook and Beth Stykers' problematic equilibrium to Olia Lialina's murmur of an unspeakable melancholy, from Wolfgang Staehle's meditative contemplation to Zhang Ga's implicit commentary in a transposed time and space. They set forth environments, milieus, images, and language to suggest complex structures that engender a psychological impact and leave an emotional residue.

Towards a recombinant reality.

- Zhang Ga