Networked Nature at Foxy Production

Greetings and Happy New Year! If you're planning to be in New York in
January-February, please visit the following exhibition, which Rhizome
has organized at Foxy Production. The show opens January 11th and it
would be great to see you there!


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Marisa Olson
Editor & Curator
Rhizome.org at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art


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NETWORKED NATURE

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Organized by RHIZOME, an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art

January 11 - February 18, 2007
Opening reception: January 11, 6-8 PM

Foxy Production presents Networked Nature, a group exhibition that
inventively explores the representation of 'nature' through the
perspective of networked culture. The exhibition includes works by C5,
Futurefarmers, Shih-Chieh Huang, Philip Ross, Stephen Vitiello, and
Gail Wight, who provocatively combine art and politics with innovative
technology, such as global positioning systems (GPS), robotics, and
hydroponic environments.

In their work Perfect View, San Jose-based collective C5 reached out
to the subculture of recreational GPS users, or geo-cachers, asking
them for their recommendations of 'sublime locales.' The submitted
latitudes and longitudes provided the guide points for a thirty-three
state, thirteen-thousand mile motorcycle expedition by collective
member Jack Toolin, who photographed the terrain at the given
coordinates. The results, presented in triptychs, smartly subvert
traditional representations of landscape and notions of the sublime.

San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers' Photosynthesis Robot is
a three-dimensional model of a possible perpetual motion machine
driven by phototropism - the movement of plants towards the direction
of the sun. Their proposal that a group plants will very slowly propel
a four wheel vehicle is a witty take on the pressing search for new
forms of energy.

New York artist Shih-Chieh Huang's inflatable installation, Din-Don I,
is inspired by everyday household electronic devices and his studies
of physical computing and robotics. In this ingenious exploration of
organic systems, he creates a dynamic circulation of electricity and
air: a living micro-environment.

San Francisco-based Philip Ross' Juniors are self-contained survival
capsules for living plants. Blown glass enclosures provide a
controlled hydroponic environment, where plants' roots are submerged
in nutrient-infused water, while LED lights supply the necessary
illumination. The artist has drawn on two culturally divergent
traditions - Chinese scholars' objects and Victorian glass
conservatories