Synthetic Pleasures: a NYC art exhibit

Synthetic Pleasures: Cybernetic Relationships in Studio Art Practice
On view from March 29-April 23, 2004, MACY Gallery, Teachers College Columbia University

Opening Reception: FRIDAY, APRIL 2nd, FROM 5-9PM, including performance by Torino::Margolis and special guest, Space Painter at 6:00PM.

The exhibition, Synthetic Pleasures: Cybernetic Relationships in Studio Art Practice, is the culmination of a collaboration between eleven artists with a visual arts researcher from Teachers College, Columbia University. These artists underwent a series of videotaped interviews regarding their integration of digital technologies into their studio practice. These interviews, the resultant art objects, and the exhibition constitute a project-based case study. Artists have been making art with computer systems since the 1960's, but the investigation of information arts and their impact on critical consciousness has just begun. This study examines artists' relationships to computer systems in their studio practice, not only their means of making artworks but their conceptualization of them.

Human Computer Interface (HCI) is blurring in the new millennium. We as a species are quickly evolving toward a Cyborgian stage. Our relationship to the development of cybernetics and HCI is in need of critical reflection by the mass collective. In the information age everyone has become a manipulator and during this time of strife the mechanism of terrorism is quickly ascertained. It is crucial that we begin to assess our relationship to digital systems as they permeate our infrastructures and our bodies, violate our privacy, empower our information distribution capability, increase our speed of communication and demands for responsiveness, and subvert our belief systems. Who better than the artist practitioner to help us step back in unexpected ways in order to yield provocative insight into the battleground of interface between humans and computers in both RTVR (Real Time Virtual Reality) and RTF2F (Real Time Face to Face)? S.MAYO