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Indepth Arts News:
"Cin-o-matic: Memory and Cinematic Perception"
2001-10-19 until 2001-12-30
New Museum of Contemporary Art
New York, NY,
USA
Cin-o-matic explores the evolution of the cinematic experience and the impact of new
technologies on time-based works. The exhibition includes the artist collaborative project Adrift
and works by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig, Yucef Mehri, Joseph Nechvatal, and John
Cabral. Each of the projects presented utilizes the Internet as a tool for reconfiguring
media-into network performance, net art, software-propelled visualizations, or sculptural
objects-and each creates a new cinematic experience.
Although they embrace an impressive
range of approaches and visual languages, the works in Cin-o-matic share a central concern
with how we explore and perceive time, space, and movement through today's advanced
technologies.
Adrift, a collaboration by Helen Thorington, Marek Walczak, and Jesse Gilbert with Martin
Wattenberg and Hal Eager, is an evolving multi-location Internet performance project that
combines projections, narrative text, and richly textured sound streaming in real-time, linking
imaginary and actual geographies. Presented for the first time on a large, semicircular screen
which recalls the Cineorama, a panoramic projection space used during the World's Fair in
France in 1900 to simulate a sense of drifting through an environment, Adrift creates an
immersive journey through both real and virtual imagery of a harbor, metaphorically linking
Internet surfing and physical movement. On opening night, Adrift will be performed by artists
in different locations, and a logged datastream of an archive of this performance augmented
with live inputs will replay in the gallery during the exhibition.
Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig present Appearance Machine, a constructed sculptural
ecosystem that produces a cinematic aural/visual space by continuously transforming data
input from locally generated refuse via a robotic system and distributing it, using live feed as
media, to a global community. Images from the machine, located in Brooklyn, are analyzed for
movement by the computer, and an accompanying soundtrack is generated. This sound
subsequently guides the machine's mechanisms, creating additional motion and setting in
place a continuous system.
When viewed as installations, Adrift and Appearance Machine both imply a reconfiguration of
the object into a cinematic experience. These works function as mechanisms in which particular
elements are interchangeable so that the structure, context, and content can be translated
into a variety of mediums for display.
Using the familiar visual imagery of early video games, Yucef Merhi has created net@ari, a film
that breaks down the language of cinema through basic programming and investigates the
psychological relationship between human being and machine. Joseph Nechvatal's Computer
Virus 2.0 is a synthetic system that behaves like a living organism by gradually eating away at
the available visual imagery, commenting upon the fetishization of visual images through
technological reproduction.
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