The newest exhibition organized by Threshold Artspace Curator Iliyana Nedkova, "Primary Ingredients" at Perth's Horsecross Gallery, seeks to challenge the supposed superiority of words over images as a means of communication. She calls it "A fresh opportunity to test our assumptions that words have cognitive primacy in the brain of the viewer." The show will premiere five new commissioned works by new media veterans Vuk Cosic, Alec Finlay, Clive Gillman, Katja Loher, and Valentin Stefanoff, and will be shown together with works by Perry Bard and Krassimir Terziev. Threshold represents Scotland's only permanent new media art collection so it makes sense that Nedkova would invite these artists to respond to twelve pieces in the collection of their host institution. Cosic revisits his signature style of converting classic moving image works to ASCII text, this time shining the spotlight on King Kong. His contribution is posited as a precursor to his solo show in the space, next year. Clive Gillman takes the 22 video channels of Threshold's permanent Wave installation and translates them into 22 letters, each addressing the bonds and pacts made between artists and their audiences. Perry Bard opens up this relationship by inviting anyone to join him in uploading video shots that constitute a databased remake of Dziga Vertov's classic self-reflexive film, The Man with the Movie Camera. Other works in the show further push the translation envelope, their wrks floating between visual poetry and literary images. "Primary Ingredients" is up through August 31st. - Marisa Olson
Image: Vuk Cosic, Kong Kong ASCII, 2008.