CROSSMEDIALE 2 & Bridge Art Fair

Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery
1646 N. Bosworth Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622
T.847.858.1540
http://www.gosiakoscielak.com
[email protected]


CROSSMEDIALE 2
An exhibition of American and International art in new media curated by Gosia Koscielak

April 13 - May 12, 2007

Opening reception: Friday, April 13, 6-10 p.m.

Special Event :
Translations/Tower of Babelfish online performance by the Second Front, Patrick Lichty and Scott Kildall.

CROSSMEDIALE 2 will also be at Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery’s Booth # 12 at Bridge Art Fair Chicago; April 27-30, 2007. For more details on Bridge Art Fair Chicago: http://www.bridgeartfair.com/chicago.

CrossMediale 2 focuses on the concept of transcultural change and translation in a broader sense.

As a continuation of the ongoing curatorial Transcultural Projects initially developed by Gosia Koscielak in 2000 (Transcultural Visions: Polish - American Contemporary Art, which was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2001 and at the National Museum in Szczecin, Poland in 2002 http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/TransCultural0201-1.shtml
Crossmediale 2 continues to investigate how complex identities, a multimedia reality, and the multicultural mosaic of humanity create the Global-Local world and GLOCAL identity through a variety of local and international artistic responses. Ultimately, the artworks featured change our understanding of transcultural society, and thus change our understanding about human existence.

The exhibit focuses on new media works as well as on artworks that relate to this curatorial concept in a variety of media - including photography, video, drawings, side specific installation, virtual animation, website artworks/project, and virtual performance.


Participating artists in Crossmediale 2:
Annette Barbier (Chicago); Hans Bernhard (Vienna); Drew Browning (Chicago), David Blum (Chicago); Scott Kildall (San Francisco); Lizvlx (Vienna); Erik Olofsen (Amsterdam); Silvia Malagrino (Chicago), Pat Badani (Chicago); Galina Shevchenko (Chicago), UBERMORGEN (Vienna); Patrick Lichty (Chicago), Susan Sensemann (Chicago), Richard Purdy (New York); Silvia Rozanka (Chicago); Ben Chang (Chicago); Deborah Boardman (Chicago); Janell Baxter (Chicago), Tracy Marie Taylor (Chicago): David Zerlin (Chicago); and La Bande Sans Fin (Chicago).



Some highlights from the exhibit include:

Chicago digital artists Annette Barbier and Drew Browning’s collaboration in Stream-ing, an interactive installation about the interdependent relationship of people and the environment. The Illinois Waterway, which includes the Chicago and Illinois rivers and runs from Chicago through Peoria, operates as both the metaphor for interconnectedness and the subject of data collection in this interactive installation that surrounds participants with a responsive aural and visual environment including a 30 foot long projection on the floor that viewers/visitors must navigate.

Pat Badani will present Trans (mute), screen - based installation from 2007. Trans(mute) extends Badani’s decade-long exploration on shifting cultural constructs. The work re-processes information from her “ Where are you from? Stories” database. It is a response to ongoing question about the possibility of cultural and linguistic “translation” in an attempt to transfer, transpose, interpretate, reproduce, imitate, reword or recode meaning. Trans(mute) addresses issues related to cross-cultural relationships.

Scott Kildall’s video, Something To Remind Me, works at the intersection of cultural memory and the psychology of time. Seeing himself as a gatherer, creator and editor,
Kildall’s stitches together media such as voicemails from personal ads, “in-between” cinematic moments and found landscapes from Second Life, and weaves them into
architectural structures and sculptures.


Patrick Lichty, a Chicago based new media artist, curator, and lecturer, presents animation work and digital prints from the project, Reconstructing Cicciolina: A Virtual Reality Opera. Lichty performs in the online virtual reality world as La Cicciolina, a virtual avatar who appears as a Lady Godiva of sorts, and in the process explores whether this artificial being is any more or less constructed or real than the artist himself.

Scott Kildall and Patrick Lichty with the Second Front will present an online performance: Translations/Tower of Babelfish. In this performance, Second Front will attempt to perform in the avatar based online virtual reality world, Second Life, a number of texts from online sources, Fluxus performances, and so on which have been processed through the BabelFish translation engine numerous times. The resulting skews and juxtapositions in translation and cultural context will highlight the challenges of the Global Village writ large as machine translations further confuse interpersonal communication.

Second Front is the first dedicated performance art troupe in the online avatar-based VR world, Second Life. Founded in 2006 by Doug Jarvis, (Vancouver), Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty (Chicago) and Jeremy Turner (Vancouver), and including numerous artists such as Gazira Babeli. Taking their influences from numerous sources, including Dada, Fluxus, Futurist Syntesi, the Situationist International and contemporary performance artists like Laurie Anderson and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Second Front creates theatres of the absurd that challenge notions of virtual embodiment, online performance and the formation of virtual narrative. Created in 2006, they have already performed extensively, including in Vancouver, Chicago, New York, and has been featured in publications including Slate, Eikon, and Die Zeit.


Susan Sensemann will present her drawing Scan, an abstract interpretation of the scan of the human brain which transcends the physicality of the BRAIN image. Sensemann’s translation of this high tech scan through her hand and into the more intimate medium of drawing shows how the artist can transcend the physicality of the BRAIN, by convert a technological product into a metaphysical experience.


UBERMORGEN will present a photo series from The Chinese Gold Project, a web based project in which artist mixes up the real "virtual" (the game) with the virtually "real" (money). In addition, UBERMORGEN's paintings from the ART FID (2005) series will be on display. These digital prints on canvas portray the structure of round RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips, mini identification systems that can be attached to a person or a product to collect diverse information about the product or person and continue and which are a terrifying reality of the future.

Richard Purdy’s encaustic paintings on wood wrestle with quantum mechanics, cosmology, computer programming, and fractal geometry.
This work combines the use of computer-generated imagery with children's drawing implements like the Spirograph. While inevitably coded, these images make themselves accessible to people of diverse backgrounds.