The Upgrade! w/Mark Napier, Thurs, October 27

Upgrade! New York invites:

We are delighted to have Mark Napier for his third Upgrade! talk in tandem with his solo exhibition at bitforms gallery opening this Saturday, October 22.

The evening will begin with a brief report from Liz Slagus on what we learned and planned during the first international conference to evolve the network and create opportunities for artists working in art + tech.

Followed, Mark will discuss his exploration in the past two years that include: 3D graphics and hardware level rendering techniques, the value of standards like OpenGL, the use of virtual spaces in artwork and some of the pitfalls he found in interfaces and interactivity. He'll demonstrate the new work, and talk a little about the pleasures and perils of showing interactive work in a gallery space.

The works Mark will show are from the new series titled Empire. These pieces all use a 3D model of the Empire State building as an interactive device. The viewer of the artwork can pick up, throw, bend, bounce and crush the building. The works read as 3D spaces, but the building also acts as a brush, leaving traces of its image behind as it moves across the screen, creating washes of ghostly architecture that build slowly with repeated layerings. The monument is made virtual, malleable, breakable and at the same time unbreakable.


Bio + + +

Mark Napier, painter-turned-new-media-artist, is a pioneer in the realm of Internet art. Through his early web-based artworks such as “The Shredder”, “Digital Landfill”, and “Feed”, Napier explores the potential of worldwide networks as a public space for virtual art. His experience as a software developer informs Napier’s software craft he uses code as an expressive form, and the Internet as his exhibition space and laboratory. Napier’s online studio, potatoland.org, is an open playground of interactive artwork. Napier creates a wide range of projects that appropriate data from the web transforming content into abstraction, text into graphics, and information into art.

His work has been included in seminal exhibitions of Digital Art including the Whitney Museum of American Art's Data Dynamics exhibition, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Art's 010101: Art in the Age of Technology, and the net_condition exhibition at ZKM (Center for Art & Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

A recipient of grants from Creative Capital, NYFA, and the Greenwall Foundation, Napier has also been commissioned to create artwork for SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim. Napier’s work has also been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, PS1, the Walker Arts Center, Ars Electronica, The Kitchen, Kunstlerhaus Vienna, Transmediale, Bard College, the Princeton Art Museum, ASCII Digital Festival, bitforms gallery in Seoul, and la Villette in Paris among many others.


URLs:
http://www.potatoland.org
http://potatoland.com/empire/

When/Where:
Eyebeam
Thursday, October 27, 7:30 PM
540-548 west 21st street (bet 10 & 11 Ave)

Best,
Yael Kanarek

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http://www.theupgrade.org

The Upgrade! is an international network of gatherings concerning art + tech + culture.

About our host: Eyebeam is a not-for-profit organization established in 1996. Through its Education, Moving Image and Exhibition divisions the organization works to expand the public's appreciation and understanding of media art. As part of its mission and efforts to provide support
for artists working within the intersection of art, science, and technology, Eyebeam is excited to act as host for the Upgrade! events and activities since April 2000.